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Re: Word documents and tables

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From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Oct 27, 2010 12:18PM

One other thought, Mike. You said:

>The use of bookmarks to add table header support in Word is a JAWS-specific hack. It does not work with other screen readers and is very fragile. You must name the bookmark "Title", "RowTitle", or "ColumnTitle" [plus a number, if more than one bookmark of that type]. If you change the table or add additional tables you may need to redo the bookmarks.
My thought:

What's the difference between a hack and standard practice? Sometimes, it's the level of acceptance and the robustness of support.

What would it take to get other screen readers to follow JAWS in this respect? That would address acceptance.

And what would it take to get Word and other word processing applications to robustly support this technique?

Ideally, creation of the bookmark would trigger from a setting in the Table Properties. The author could check off whether the table has a header row, header column, or both, and the bookmark would be created accordingly. The number in each bookmark's name could match the table number, and the bookmark names could be updated either dynamically as tables are added and removed or on command -- for example, as part of "Update all fields."

And when a PDF is created, Acrobat Pro could read that property and tag not only the header row but also a header column when appropriate.

Even without these suggested improvements, and in spite of its problems and limitations, this strikes me as an elegant solution to the problem of tagging table structure in word processing documents.

Cliff

>>> On 10/27/2010 at 8:00 AM, in message < <EMAIL REMOVED> >, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
That is correct, you can only provide support for complex tables in HTML and PDF and PDF has a serious resource issue when using JFW which can cause a lot of lag time. We are currently experimenting with changes in the tag tree and the content tree to see if we can find a way to reduce this but it is a very time consuming process. Best practice is still to keep all tables as simple as possible since it makes the information more understandable for everyone. We plan to present our findings and any new techniques that we have learned at AccessU in May.

Mike Moore