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Missing support for scope="rowgroup" attributes within tables

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 17, 2014 5:25PM

Hey gang

I have been playing around with trying to make rowgroups header cells
within tables. However I am coming up empty as far as screen reader
support for this attribute.

I could post a whole html example here if people want, but the idea is
that we can have an entry that serves as the row header for multiple
rows in a table.
<th scope="rowgroup" rowspan="3">
..
would serve as the row header (possibly along with others) for 3 rows
in a table.
So
<tr>
<th rowspan="2" scope="rowgroup">Microsoft</th>
<th scope="row">Ms Office</th>
<td>Joe Schmo</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Ms Visual Studio</th><td>Jim Schmo</td></tr>
should have screen readers read "Microsoft Ms Office" as the row
header for the Joe Schmo column and "Microsoft Ms Visual Studio" for
Jim Schmo.

When you implement the same with colgroup and colspan you get
consistent results in both Jaws and NVDA.
However the rowgroup scope attribute is not picked up by either, in IE
or Firefox.

The questions I have:
1. Does anyone know if this is a failure of the assistive technology
vendors, or is this a more fundamental problem within the browser's
accessibility API (this is a valid markup as far as I can see)?
2. Is there any difference if these tables are exposed as ARIA grids
rather than tables(grid inherit all the underlying table attributes)?

Obviously I am going to start playing around with markup and testing
(I have a much more accurate and complete markup that I am playing
with myself), so I will provide answer to my questions fairly easily,
but I wanted to just see if someone else has encountered this problem
and has experience or opinions about this.
Cheers
-Birkir



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