WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: what to do when CMS doesn't support table caption or <tfootr>

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 2, 2011 7:03PM

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Angela French wrote:

> For instance, when inserting a table, there is no way to define a caption, or to define <tfoot> for purposes of adding supporting footnotes on a table.

<tfoot> is not for footnotes at all. It's for a static footer,
generally used to duplicate column headers at the bottom of a table
and at the bottom of each printed page. <thead>, <tfoot>, and <tbody>
don't do anything for accessibility that I'm aware of (despite
repeated and persistent recommendations by many in the field that they
be implemented for accessibility purposes).

>  I am resorting to just "captioning" the table with the appropriate heading level,

Short of getting a proper CMS, this is probably the best you can do.
One could maybe use aria-labelledby or aria-describedby on the <table>
tag to point to the heading to associate the two, but I suppose if
your CMS doesn't support <caption>, it's a bit silly to suggest ARIA.

> but am not sure the best way to present table "footnotes".  Currently, users have just dropped them into the bottom row .

Definitely don't use <tfoot> or put them in as data in the bottom row.
As noted in the HTML5 spec, there aren't yet semantics for footnotes,
though it does suggest several alternatives -
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#footnotes

Jared