Description

In the data views, the checkboxes to select items get only visible on hover or focus. While I understand the intent of making the UI look cleaner, I think the current pattern doesn't help usability and accessibility. Instead of keeping prioritizing visual cleanless as proposed in #59128 and making all controls only visible on hover or focus, I think a better, more understandable, predictable, and self-explanatory user interface needs to make everything visible by default.

Screenshot:

• Prioir accessibility feedback on several issues and pull requests always reported that controls that continously appear and disappera are an inherent accessibility problem. It doesn't matter whether they appear and disappear because they are conditionally rendered or because their visibility is toggled after user interaction. The appearing / disappearing isn't a good inclusive pattern and should be avoided.
• Cognitive load: the UI isn't self-explanatory: users have to first interact with the interface to see and understand what they can do with the UI.
• The checkboxes appear when hovering on any part of a row. That's confusing because the Title text looks like the checkbox label. When hovering the title, the gray text of the title looks like a <label> element. The mouse cursor becomes a pointer. As a useer, I would expect that clicking the title select the checkbox. Instead, the title is a link to the item details (in the screenshot above it's a link to the page). By making the checkboxes always visible, it would be more intuitive that checkbox and title are two separate controls with two different purposes.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

• Go to Site Editor > Pages > Manage all pages.
• Observe the table with the list of pages.
• Observe the checkboxes aren't visible.
• Hover a table row or use the keyboard to navigate within the table.
• Observe the checkboxes get only visible on hover and focus.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

No response

Environment info

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Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

Yes