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Re: Reading of tables with JAWS

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From: Léonie Watson
Date: Jan 5, 2010 5:03AM

"For appearance the table looks like a table but JAWS is unable to recognise as a table for e.g. If you press "t" with JAWS its reading "No tables found in the page".
We provided the role attribute (role="grid"). JAWS is able to recognise this table grid but it is not passing the xhtml validation.
Any thoughts?"

For the quick nav key to work, the standard table code needs to be in the page. I've run a couple of quick tests with Jaws 11, which seem to suggest that the role="grid" attribute isn't recognised by Jaws unless it's applied to an actual table.


When the role=grid attribute is applied to a table, Jaws reports something along the lines of "Editable table with x columns and y rows". Ordinarily, Jaws would report "Table with x columns and y rows".

Jaws didn't recognise the grid role when I applied it directly to a div. The ARIA spec seems to suggest that a hierarchy of roles is needed within the grid code, which I didn't have time to experiment with I'm afraid. If you have an example available, I'd be interested to explore a more complex example though.


Regards,
Léonie.

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Léonie Watson | Director of Accessibility
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