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Re: advise on complex table

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Apr 17, 2014 7:25PM

I would (based on a quick review):

1. Remove non-tabular elements from the table, particularly the
footnote type things starting in row 19
"FTE Type 1: Day On Campus w/o Online (Catagory 3N)
..."
It is never good when non-tabular info is mixed with tabular info
inside a single table, it confuses the heck out of the user.

2. The h5 heading with the table title "
Assignable Square Feet (ASF) per FTE Student ", in the first row of
the table (td cell with colspan=5) is ok, but it should rather be the
<caption> element for the table. I now those can be tricky to style
using CSS, so one may want to move it ouside the table and just make
it a heading.

3. The first column (rows 3 through 18) cells should be th cells with
scope="row, this is "general class room" "basic skills" etc.

4. The td cells in row 2 "
"Academic FTE" etc. should be <th> cells with scope="colgroup", and
should not have rowspan="1". This way they are associated with all the
columns underneath them (this works well with Jaws and NVDA, does not
work with Voiceover, but neither does header/id association)..
So "Academic FTE" td cell should be th with colspan="2" and scope="colgroup".

5. The td cells in the third row of the table "First 1000" and
"additional", and so on, should be th cells with scope="col".

6. Entries with td cells with colspan=6, such as "art" and "drama"
should be put in the last two rows of the table.

Screen readers recognize scope="colgroup" and will read the
appropriate headers for the colgroup as well as the individual
columnss.

The values in the first column should be the rowheader for the table.
Once you remove the non-tabular datafrom of the table data does not
get in the way of understanding the table construct.
Cheers
-B


On 4/17/14, Angela French < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Thank might work to take out the Music, Art, Drama. Will have to discuss
> with the content owner. Regarding acronyms, yeah anyone reading this policy
> manual know that an FTE is a full-time enrolled student. Is there a good
> way to indicate "non-applicable" to screen readers? Is N/A understood
> aurally as it is visually?
>
> I understand about the notes being in rows. I did make a note of that one.
> I'm trying to get all the possible suggestions together before I dive in and
> present a solution to the content owner.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>