Twenty Fourteen: Inconsistent Gallery Caption/Link Behavior with Touch

[celloexpressions]

If you tap in the space where a caption will appear (like on hover) in Chrome or Firefox (on win8.1), the text will display, but the link will not activate. The only way to activate the link is to tap on the top part of the image that the caption won't cover. However, there is no way as a user to know which images have captions or how long they are (and thus how much space they occupy). Users might first tap on an image and activate a caption, then not realize that it links to the full view. Worth noting that with mouse the caption portion is still not linked, which may be confusing.

In IE11 this issue is considerably worse. Tapping where a caption would be visible on hover selects some text (typically a single word that was tapped) but none of the caption becomes visible. This results in the strange appearance of the OS' selection adjustment icons but with the absence of any text being selected. And again, there is no indication that the image is linked.

It probably only takes one or two failed attempts to tap an image thinking it's a link for the user to learn that the images aren't linked. The best solution is probably to make sure that the caption portion is also linked to the attachment page, ensuring consistent behavior for all users regardless of browser and input type. This means that gallery captions will never be visible (except on the attachment page) with touch and they will still be visible on hover with mouse, but the text will not be selectable.

[celloexpressions]

I believe the only way to fix this is to re-work the html markup, which I'm guessing isn't an option. The solution would be to wrap both the caption and the image in the link, but that isn't something we can hack with css.

[lancewillett]

@celloexpressions Can you open a core ticket to rework the HTML markup? Maybe for 3.9.