WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: another way to create header attribute in complext tables?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 11, 2014 6:46AM

NVDA and Jaws fully support "scope="colgroup" along with the colspan
attribute in complex tables.
<th colspan="2" scope="colgroup">Phone number</th>
<th scope="col">Home</th>
<th scope="col">Work</th>
<td>555-555-5555</td>
<td>555-555-5556</td>
(just add table and tr attributes if you want to create a test table).

Jaws will read colgroup header first, then individual column header
(phone number, work, 555 555 5555).
NVDA does the opposite (work, phone number ...).
Voiceover does not read this, but it does not read the headers/id
connection either (tested with 7, there could have been updates that
addressed this).
It appears to work using aria-labelledby pointing to id of col and row headers.
None of these screen readers, in my most recent checks, support
rowgroup, and I am at a loss to explain why if colgroup is well
supported.
It is on my to-do list to explore this, only that list is bloody long.
Hope this helps, a bit.
-B

On 12/10/14, Ryan E. Benson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> One other thing is see if there is a code view. A lot of CMS' I have worked
> with present a WYSIWYG editor, but have a code view or view source for the
> content. This may need to be enabled in some set of options. Once you get
> in, you can manually edit the code, and add the stuff Jared said
>
> --
> Ryan E. Benson
>
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Angela French < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Thanks Jared. I haven't coded up a complex table in a long time. In the
>> CMS I am able to provide the scope to row, column, row group and column
>> group.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto:
>> <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2014 9:20 AM
>> To: WebAIM Discussion List
>> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] another way to create header attribute in complext
>> tables?
>>
>> The article you reference is almost 10 years old. It's recommendation to
>> avoid the scope attribute is quite outdated.
>>
>> Can you assign the scope="col" or scope="row" attributes to the header
>> cells as documented at http://webaim.org/techniques/tables/data#headers?
>>
>> If not, it's unlikely that the table would ever be highly accessible.
>> I don't think I've ever seen a table that is so complex that it requires
>> the headers/id approach (i.e., scope is not sufficient) that is actually
>> understandable to a screen reader user.
>>
>> Jared
>> >> >> messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> >> >> >>
> > > >


--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.