CUNY Academic Commons

I personally am not a fan of target="_blank". See https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/10712#note-2 and follow-up conversation. Moreover, I'm not a huge fan of messing with the default settings of third-party plugins, because it complicates updates and puts us out of step with their documentation, etc. But if others feel strongly that the current behavior is potentially confusing, it's probably possible to change the default behavior, either globally or in the case of the Teaching Template only.

I agree with you, Boone, on both counts. The other option would be to remove WP-Accessibility from the teaching package, but I don't think that's a good option, either. So my take would be that we should try to address this in documentation as an initial.

I do think that the kinds of users who want to use Target=_blank are likely advanced users and will get in touch if they find that it is not working.

If this becomes an issue that a lot of users contact us about, we may want to consider as a next step a more intrusive notification when people first hit the dashboard, telling them that WP-Accessibiility is enabled, that some expected behaviors may be changed as a result, and that they can visit documentation to learn more.

That makes sense to me, Matt (though I might characterize the kinds of users who would choose to open links in a new window as "intermediate"). Are there other expected behaviors that WP-Accessibility changes? I think it would be very helpful to have a documented list of these behaviors.

Speaking of documentation, it would also be helpful to have additional information about the other plugins in the Teaching template. The help page for the template currently contains minimal information: https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/teaching-template/

Boone Gorges wrote:

I personally am not a fan of target="_blank". See https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/10712#note-2 and follow-up conversation. Moreover, I'm not a huge fan of messing with the default settings of third-party plugins, because it complicates updates and puts us out of step with their documentation, etc. But if others feel strongly that the current behavior is potentially confusing, it's probably possible to change the default behavior, either globally or in the case of the Teaching Template only.

I agree with this. target="_blank" is a behavior a lot of people are used to using, but it doesn't align with Accessibility standards. It always takes a while for users to readjust their mental model to a standardized behavior like this. I would advocate to keep the accessibility plugin with it's defaults active and to not make any exceptions unless it's clearly marked with the link as per accessibility standards. I agree that starting with adding these behaviors we've determined as default to the documentation.

I will plan to add this into the upgrade on the "Teaching on the Commons" Site as part of an overview and documentation of the teaching template.