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Re: Missing support for scope="rowgroup" attributes within tables

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From: Michael Moore
Date: May 21, 2014 12:15PM

Hi Birkir,

This sounds like a continuation of the problem where the screen reader does
not recognize rowspan but does recognize colspan. My personal opinion is
that this is the fault of the screen reader but since it is unsupported on
all screen readers that I know of the problem probably is deeper than that.
The only work around that I know is to put id's on the row header cells and
use the headers attribute to associate each data cell with the appropriate
row headers. This is a major pain in the tail and it is not unique to HTML.
The same issue exists with PDFs that contain more than one column of row
headers.

Mike


On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 6:25 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > >