For accessibility, a mixture of the two approaches tables vs. lists would have been the optimum. And maybe that’s still pssible to do?
My suggestion would be this:
1. On the forums overview page, where there are forums, topics in each forum, etc., a table is the appropriate form to use. It has column headers, and each row consists of a data record AKA a single forum. For this, a data table, wsemantically a table with appropriate tags, is indeed the correct way to go! Not all tables are bad per se!
2. Same goes for the listings of topics within each forum. These have column headers, too, and each row tells the story about each topic. A perfectly legal and sanctioned use of tables!
3. The only part where a table is not appropriate for usage is when displaying a single topic with its replies. The TwentyTen bbPress theme definitely uses a data table semantics for layout purposes here, e. g. grouping a reply header, content, and footer together in a way that is clearly meant for layout. There are no column headers, and not every row tells a story about a single post. Instead, a post spans multiple rows, each with different information. This is what accessibility folks call layout tables, and these are banned by the W3C and hated passionately by each screen reader user on this planet. Topics and replies lump together in a big spaghetti-like table without a real distinction where one post ends and the next begins.
Converting this to more appropriate markup was the right thing to do. Converting the forums and topics listings, was not. A list item is a list item, and not a column header or table cell. In data tables, browsers’ accessibility APIs can create correct linkage between a column header and the relating cell down in the table. The user can therefore hear if the number they’re hearing is the number of voices, replies, the title or what. If these are done by lists as it is now, there is no way on this planet that this kind of essential linkage can be provided. There is simply no technique to do this.
I would like to strongly request, and I will also put this in a Trac ticket, that the bbt-compat files be adjusted so that forum listings and topic listings use a regular data table as they do in TwentyTen, and that the single reply and topic page be kept as the updated version that’s there now.
In fact, this very support forum uses the exact right combination of things! Why it differs from what will be in 2.1 if things aren’t changed, I don’t know.
This is an urgent plea to consider making these changes for better accessibility of 2.1!
Marco
