Links acting like buttons have a few disadvantages.
First, screen readers will announce them as "links". Screen reader users
usually associate links with "things that get you somewhere" and buttons
with "things that perform an action". So when something like "Delete,
link" is announced, they'll probably think this is a link which will
take them to another page where they can delete a record.
Furthermore, the URL of the link for the "destroy" action might be the
same as the URL for the "show" action (only one is accessed with a
DELETE request and the other one with a GET request). That means screen
readers could announce the link like "Delete, visited link", which is
very confusing.
They also won't work when opening links in a new tab, since opening
links in a new tab always results in a GET request to the URL the link
points to.
Finally, submit buttons work without JavaScript enabled, so they'll work
even if the JavaScript in the page hasn't loaded (for whatever reason).
For all these reasons (and probably many more), using a button to send
forms is IMHO superior to using links.
There's one disadvantage, though. Using `button_to` we create a <form>
tag, which means we'll generate invalid HTML if the table is inside
another form. If we run into this issue, we need to use `button_tag`
with a `form` attribute and then generate a form somewhere else inside
the HTML (with `content_for`).
Note we're using `button_to` with a block so it generates a <button>
tag. Using it in a different way the text would result in an <input />
tag, and input elements can't have pseudocontent added via CSS.
The following code could be a starting point to use the `button_tag`
with a `form` attribute. One advantage of this approach is screen
readers wouldn't announce "leaving form" while navigating through these
buttons. However, it doesn't work in Internet Explorer.
```
ERB:
<% content_for(:hidden_content, form_tag(path, form_options) {}) %>
<%= button_tag text, button_options %>
Ruby:
def form_id
path.gsub("/", "_")
end
def form_options
{ id: form_id, method: options[:method] }
end
def button_options
html_options.except(:method).merge(form: form_id)
end
Layout:
<%= content_for :hidden_content %> # Right before the `</body>`
```
When we see a list of, let's say, banners, and each one has a link to
edit them, the word "banner" in the text "edit banner" is redundant and
adds noise; even for users with cognitive disabilities, it's obvious
that the "edit" link refers to the banner.
In commit 9794ffbbf, we replaced "buttons" with icons in order to make
the admin interface consistent with the planned budget investments
redesign.
However, using icons has some issues. For once, icons like a trash for
the "delete" action might be obvious, but other icons like "confirm
moderation" or "send pending" might be a bit confusing.
It's true that we were adding tooltips on hover. We tried two
approaches: using Foundation's tooltips and using CSS tooltips.
Foundation tooltips are not activated on focus (only on hover), while
CSS tooltips always appear below the icon, which might be a problem when
the icons are at the bottom of the screen (one of our milestone tests
was failing because of that and we can now run it with JavaScript
enabled).
Both Foundation and CSS tooltips have other issues:
* They force users to make an extra step and move the mouse over the
link just to know what the link is about
* They aren't available on touch screens, so these users will have to
memorize what each icon does
* They are not hoverable, and making them hoverable would cause a
different issue because the tooltip might cover links below it, making
it impossible to click these links without moving the mouse away
first
* They are not dismissable, which is considered an accessibility issue
and a requirement in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [1]
For all these reasons, we're using both texts and icons. As Thomas
Byttebier said "The best icon is a text label [2]". Heydon Pickering
also makes a point towards providing text alongside icons in his book
"Inclusive Components" [3].
Note that, since we're now adding text and some of the colors we use for
actions are hard to read against a white/gray background, we're making a
few colors darker.
With these changes, actions take more space in the admin table compared
to the space they took in version 1.3, but they are more usable and
accessible while they still take less space than they did in version
1.2.
[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/content-on-hover-or-focus
[2] https://thomasbyttebier.be/blog/the-best-icon-is-a-text-label
[3] https://inclusive-components.design/tooltips-toggletips/
There's a usability issue in certain cases in browsers: when the
milestones table is at the bottom of the screen and it fills the screen
width completely, hovering over the link to delete a milestone makes the
"Delete milestone" tooltip cause a horizontal scrollbar. The scrollbar
makes it impossible for users to click the link.
We should probably fix this usuability issue; for now, I'm keeping the
test the way it was.
In some tables, we had "actions", and some columns were also links
pointing to some places. Having both of them at the same time is
confusing, particularly since traditionally the links in the columns
pointed to the same place as some of the actions (although that's not
the case since commit 48db31cd).
We're still keeping links in tables which don't have an action column.
For instance, the proposals table has a "select" button which would be
harder to use if we had action buttons next to it.
