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Lack of screen reader support for tablw rowgroups, browser or assistive technology issue?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jul 10, 2014 7:55AM

Greetings everyone.

We often come across somewhat complex tables where we have a header
cell for a set of rows and then a header for each individual row.
Think, for instance, a table that shows regions of the U.S. with
states and capitals of each state.

For instance
Think
Region | State | Capital
Southeast | North Carolina | Raleigh
southeast | South Carolina | Columbia
Southeast | Georgia | Whatever burg (sorry guys, too lazy to go
Google, but I know it is not Atlanta).

The markup that seems to make sense here would be to mark the region
cell as a th header with rowspan="3" and scope="rowgroup".
<th rowspan="3" scope="rowgroup">Southeast</th>

Then each individual state is a row header (th cell with scope="row")
<th scope="row">North Carolina</th>

and the capital city is just a td cell.
<td>Raleigh</td>

But no screen readers that I have tested read both the rowgroup header
and the rowheader when I navigate around the capital cities column.
Jaws does read both "southeast" and "North Carolina" for the "Raleigh"
row, but when I move on to "Columbia" Jaws only reads "South
Carolina".
When I move into the group from below, say into "Georgia" row, Jaws
does not announce "Southeast" either (that would be consistent with
e.g. how screen readers announce legends for groups of controls, i.e.
when you enter the region, regardless of whether you do it from before
the region or after its region is announced).
NVDA ignores the rowgroup heading altogether.

The odd thing isthat when you group columns in the same manner using
colspan and scope="colgroup" screen readers handle that beautifully
(at least Jaws and NVDA do, unfortunately Voiceover does not work well
for any table markup with spans, nor with headers/id, but that is a
different discussion).

Does anyone know why this is the case?
Does the problem lie with the browsers or with the assistive technologies?
I do plan to file screen reader bugs to get a discussion going, but
wanted to tap the vast knowledge that is Webaim before doing that,
because there could be something obvious I am missing here, it has
happened before.
Cheers guys and happy Thursday to ya.
-B


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