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Re: Problem with JAWS Table Navigation?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 2, 2009 1:58PM

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Evans, Donald (Contractor)
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Can anyone explain to me why JAWS does not recognize the 3rd table in the following code as a table?

Very interesting. JAWS applies some weird heuristics to determine if a
table looks like a data table or if it looks like a layout table. The
presence of <th> should ALWAYS trigger table mode. I did some playing
around, and in this case (and probably ALL cases?), JAWS determines
that a table is a layout table if it contains more than 151 characters
in any given cell. So the 'long' text you have in the 3rd table is
throwing it off.

It also applies this wacky logic in reverse. If you remove the <th>s
from the first table, it still identifies it as a data table because
no cell has more than 151 characters.

NVDA appropriately uses the presence of headers to determine the type of table.

In other words, the presence or absence of table headers have no
impact on whether JAWS identifies a table as a data or a layout table.
It's entirely determined by the maximum amount of text in any given
cell.

Am I the only one that thinks this is totally crazy?

Jared Smith
WebAIM