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Re:

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Oct 9, 2003 6:53AM

> If you are concerned about context, then you could use format (1) and have
> scope="col" which would relate the quote with the column header above.

I am concerned about context, and associating the quote with just the column
heading is insufficient.

> ... but with the header "Project code name", what does the header relate to?
> the row headers below or the column headers across? Again, in most cases, we
> can intuit the information.

Visually we can intuit the information, but using a screen reader a user
needs additional context. This is accomplished in the HTML via @scope or
with @headers/@id.

> (2) When we look for a phone number in a phone book, there are (simplified)
> two columns, names and phone numbers. Technically, we could put a header at
> the top of the Names column, at the top of the Phone Number column and also
> mark each name as a header, leaving the phone number as the data in the data
> cell. However, we don't *need* to mark each name up as a header to know that
> the phone number on the right is related to the name on the left. In other
> words, I think for the example given on the WebAIM site of Shelly's
> Daughters, the top left cell ("Name") could be left as a header and the
> names "Beth" and "Jackie" could be table data cells. The scope attribute
> could be added for additional clarity.

We need to ensure that the cells in the left column are able to be
associated with the data cells on the right. In the case of a two column
table, it is not too hard to move one cell to the left to discover whose
phone number you have just heard when navigating the table in a "table
mode", however, if you were moving down the 5th column of a table and needed
to move 4 cells to the left and back each time you needed to know who/what
the row of data was about, that would be more of a problem.

If you make the left column cell a <td> with scope="row" that might do the
trick, but effectively you've turned the <td> into a <th>.

In reality, this discussion is largely academic since screen readers all
deal with tables differently and generally don't produce consistent results
whether you use headers, scope, etc. or not.

AWK

--
Andrew Kirkpatrick
CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
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