List Table: media wp-list-table lacks table header content for column-icon

[rianrietveld]

In wp-admin/upload.php wp-list-table the <th> for the image/file (column-icon) has no content:

<tr>
<th scope="col" id="cb" class="manage-column column-cb check-column" style="">
  <label class="screen-reader-text" for="cb-select-all-1">Select All</label>
  <input id="cb-select-all-1" type="checkbox">
</th>
<th scope="col" id="icon" class="manage-column column-icon" style=""></th>
<th scope="col" id="title" class="manage-column column-title sortable desc" style="">
  <a href=".../wp-admin/upload.php?orderby=title&amp;order=asc">
    <span>File</span><span class="sorting-indicator"></span>
  </a>
</th>

etc ...

Suggestions:

• Add as content for the column-icon: "File"
• Change the content for column-title into: "Title". This would be consistent with the other list tables in the admin

This ticket was mentioned in ​Slack in #accessibility by rianrietveld. ​View the logs.

I think this is a good solution.

This ticket was mentioned in ​Slack in #core by joedolson. ​View the logs.

I'm pretty sure the lack of heading stems from the variety of content of that column. For images it shows a preview, and "File" would make sense because you can see the content of the file. For everything else it uses icons to represent the file, and "File" would probably not really fit anymore.

Does the lack of a title present an actual problem somewhere or is this more of a cosmetic change?

Replying to obenland:

Does the lack of a title present an actual problem somewhere or is this more of a cosmetic change?

The problem here is it's a TH but there's no text to be read as column header. We should add some text or, maybe, this shouldn't be a TH but just a TD. By the way, this ticket should be considered together with #32254 if we end up hiding the linked thumbnails/icons from assistive technologies, maybe there's no point in adding the missing header text.

This ticket was mentioned in ​Slack in #accessibility by rianrietveld. ​View the logs.

Screenshot before and after applying the patch:

Maybe we could hide the header text with screen-reader-text in order to avoid a visual change and related discussions and maybe use something better than "File" as text. Should be something that covers also the cases of media being Audio, Video, documents, and any allowed media type.

Side note: changing the current "File" header text in "Title" would also encourage users to provide an actual Title for all media, with benefits for the alt-caption-title fallback see related #18984

Related: #32509

Related: #29993 maybe the thumbnail column will be removed.

In 32687:

Media: move the thumbnail into the title column in list view.

This gives us more space for the title and row actions, and will make a responsive list table enhancement significantly easier.

props bradt for the initial patch.
fixes #29993 and #32255. see #32509 and #32395.

This ticket was mentioned in ​Slack in #accessibility by afercia. ​View the logs.