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Tables and Excel: merged or unmerged cells?

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From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Apr 14, 2012 7:26PM

I have a question for our list members who use assistive technologies.

Do you want cells in a Word table or Excel spreadsheet merged or unmerged?

I'm asking because I've received conflicting information from government
clients. A few years ago I worked directly with an accessibility tester at
the National Federation of the Blind to test Excel spreadsheets for a
federal government agency. The tester wanted merged cells that spanned
appropriate columns or rows.

But many U.S. government agencies have guidelines requiring cells to be
unmerged in Word tables and Excel spreadsheets.

Here's a quick sample (also in the Word and Excel attachments). The header
"Apples" spans 2 columns, Macintosh and Red Delicious. "Pears" spans 2
columns, Bosc and Bartlett. (Please note that TD tags will be applied in the
actual Word documents).


Sales of produce for 2011 and 2012 by variety




Apples

Pears




Macintosh

Red Delicious

Bosc

Bartlett


2011

2000

2500

3000

3500


2012

1000

1500

2000

2500

Some government agencies require this version below, where "Apples" is
repeated above each column, making the table ridiculously complex for
sighted users.


Sales of produce for 2011 and 2012 by variety




Apples

Apples

Pears

Pears




Macintosh

Red Delicious

Bosc

Bartlett


2011

2000

2500

3000

3500


2012

1000

1500

2000

2500

WCAG 2.0 has notes about the scope attribute, but that is for HTML webpages
only and is not available (at this time) for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and
other non-web documents.

Thanks for any guidance you can give.

-- Bevi

--

Bevi Chagnon | <EMAIL REMOVED>

PubCom - Trainers, consultants, designers, and developers

Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and Federal Section 508

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