Defining a behavior on hover means making it different for people using
a keyboard or a touchscreen (most of the population, nowadays).
In this case, we had an accessibility issue where the message wouldn't
disappear once it appeared. That meant that, after tabbing through all
the links and buttons in, for instance, the debates index, the page
would be filled with "participation not allowed" messages, and in order
to see the information about how many people have voted, reloading the
page was required.
For touchscreen users the behavior was similar to what we get on hover,
although we've found some inconsistencies when trying to support several
elements on the same page.
We think in proposals it makes sense to hide the "support" button when
users click on it, and the same applies to the buttonsto support and
vote investment projects. However, we aren't hiding the buttons to
agree/disagree with a debate in order to keep the information about the
current number of people agreeing and disagreeing visible.
Note we're removing some support spec methods because after these
changes the duplication isn't as obvious as it was in the past.
It was hard to notice what was going on when supporting one investment
which was at the bottom of the investment index page.
I wonder whether we should add the title of the investment to this text;
I'm not doing so because we don't do that anywhere else.
Using links combined with JavaScript to generate POST requests to the
browser has a few issues.
An obvious one is that it doesn't work for users without JavaScript
enabled (which lately I've noticed are more common than I thought, even
though I've been one of them for years). These users will reach a 404
page.
Since CONSUL isn't currently designed to work without JavaScript
enabled, let's ignore this one for now.
A not so obvious issue is screen reader users might expect the link to
take them somewhere instead of performing an action (in this case,
sending a form to the server).
There might be more issues I'm unaware of. Quoting DHH [1]:
"Turning ahrefs into POSTs is a bit of an anti-pattern, especially for
a11y reasons. Better to use button_to with a styling."
So we're using a button instead. This way we can also simplify the code
and make the button disabled for unidentified users, which automatically
makes it impossible to focus it using the keyboard.
A possible disadvantage of using `button_to` is it will create a form
tag which will be announced to screen readers as a form landmark. I've
tested it with my screen reader and everything worked fine for me, but
some screen reader users might interact with these forms in a different
way and find it confusing, particularly in the case where the button is
disabled.
With this change, we're only changing links for buttons in one place.
There are other places where we should do similar changes.
[1] See issue 33 in https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-rails/
In regular system tests, we prefer testing against the text of the link
because it's easier to recognize which link we're talking about.
I was wondering whether we should remove the `title` attribute
completely and use just the `aria-label` attribute. Quoting The Paciello
Group blog [1]:
"If you want to hide content from mobile and tablet users as well as
assistive tech users and keyboard only users, use the title attribute."
However, there's a case where mouse users might find the title attribute
useful. When visiting an investment page, the connection between the
"Support" link and the investment is not as clear as it is in the
investments index page, so it might not be clear what you're supporting.
As mentioned, though, this information will only be relevant for mouse
users, who nowadays represent less than half of our users.
[1] https://www.tpgi.com/using-the-html-title-attribute-updated/
The key was declared twice and so the first one ("Support this project")
was overwritten.
We're grouping all keys related to the investment list together in order
to reduce the chances of this issue happening again (or, at least, in
this part of the code).
JavaScript is used by about 98% of web users, so by testing without it
enabled, we're only testing that the application works for a very
reduced number of users.
We proceeded this way in the past because CONSUL started using Rails 4.2
and truncating the database between JavaScript tests with database
cleaner, which made these tests terribly slow.
When we upgraded to Rails 5.1 and introduced system tests, we started
using database transactions in JavaScript tests, making these tests much
faster. So now we can use JavaScript tests everywhere without critically
slowing down our test suite.
