WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Table Structure Policy question

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 10, 2010 6:03PM

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Duff Johnson wrote:

>> ... there's currently no way to know which are
>> the row headers and which are the column headers.
>
> No?  I thought that's what scope is for!

You're right. Authors can define this markup, but screen readers do
not identify them as column headers as opposed to row headers. They
simply read the header text. And in the case of JAWS, there is no
consistent in which is read first if you're using headers/id, so you
can't even rely on the first header text being the column header, for
example.

Added difficulty comes when there are more than two headers. Assuming
this were actually supported in any screen reader, the user would not
know if the extra header is another row header or another column
header without navigating through the table and orienting to its
structure. This is why I think screen readers should identify these
explicitly in this instance ("Column headers: blah, blah").

> If I understand you correctly, and per my above point, any AT that cannot figure out which column TH and which row TH are the headers for that cell... has a nasty table-reading bug, pure and simple.
>
> Is that a fair statement?

Very fair. You can call it a bug or lack of a feature, but no matter
how you cut it, these are accessibility techniques that have been in
HTML and accessibility guidelines since at least 1999 though they are
not yet properly supported by any screen reader.

> It seems (feels) like the only real problem here is lousy support for perfectly logical, reasonable and predictable table structures in current-generation AT.
>
> ...or am I missing something?

I think you've summed it up well.

Jared