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Re: Problem with JAWS Table Navigation?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 3, 2009 8:51AM

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 5:52 AM, Evans, Donald (Contractor)
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> I'm going to start giving the advise to use DataTable = 1 to our developers.

Myself, I'm pretty uncomfortable with this approach. It's totally
arbitrary and there's nothing keeping JAWS from ignoring this
attribute in the future because it's not standards compliant.

Remember, this issue only affects data tables that don't have at least
4 cells that are less than 16000 pixels. As such, most data tables are
not affected unless nearly ALL of the cells are over that size.
Perhaps it could be implemented for these cases. There is an ARIA role
of table that should force JAWS to treat any table like a data table,
but this doesn't seem to work, at least in JAWS 10. Can somebody test
in JAWS 11?

In the opposite case, where layout tables are identified as data
tables because the cells are not large, you can add
role="presentation" to the layout table to have it not be identified
(though the contents of the table are still read as they should be).
This seems to work quite well in JAWS. Definitely use
role="presentation" over DataTable=0.

Jared