WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Problem with JAWS Table Navigation?

for

From: Moore,Michael (DARS)
Date: Dec 29, 2009 9:06AM

Well Jared,

It would appear that they are making some progress. JAWS is now announcing both tables and providing access to the headers in the data table. Unfortunately it does not ignore the layout table regardless of the verbosity settings. I prefer this error to the original. At least you always have access to the headers. We will continue to work with Freedom from our end.

Mike Moore
(512) 424-4159

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 4:14 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Problem with JAWS Table Navigation?

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Jared Smith wrote:
> I've put together some basic examples and some additional thoughts on
> our blog at http://webaim.org/blog/jaws-ate-my-tables/

I thought I'd post a quick update on the JAWS and data tables issue.
Apparently the newest version of JAWS (version 11.0.756 released Dec.
17th) has improved logic for handling data tables that have table
headers (<th> elements). Can anybody verify this? You could try with
the examples in the article at
http://webaim.org/blog/jaws-ate-my-tables/

If this works, this is excellent news - and shows that Freedom
Scientific was responsive to the stink we made about this issue.

Also, James Craig also pointed out that role="grid" is the proper ARIA
role for data tables. In my testing, adding <table role="grid"> to
data tables caused JAWS 10+ to always treat them as data tables. As
noted previously, role="presentation" causes them to always be treated
as layout tables. ARIA to the rescue!

The blog posting above has been updated to reflect these developments.

Jared Smith
WebAIM