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Re: Table captions and page headings

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Aug 16, 2015 3:51AM

At first glance I thought of page heading as a running header for a page in a paginated document, e.g. PDFor EPUB. In that case a page heading / running page header is background information aiding in orientation (answering the question "Where am I, if one jumps into the middle of the book"), and redundancy has to exist by definition.

But it seems the original poster had an HTML page in mind. As far as i know page heading is not a term of art in HTML land. I guess it is just a heading at the top of the HTML page? And not a HTML page title, right? And also not some heading in the middle of an HTML page?

I would address the problem from a general perspective, not from an accessibility perspective: why is there possibly a first heading on the HTML page whose content is possibly repeated in a table's caption. I would also like to ask: is the table essentially the only content on the page? If not, would the heading also be descriptive of the other content on the page? Then keeping the heading and the caption would be just fine. Or is it just there because it follows a certain pattern chosen for a related set of HTML pages? Then sticking to the pattern could be useful for consistency's sake, even though it might create redundancy.

Either way - once it has been established, why there might be redundant headings and captions, and whether that is a good idea in general or not, the best approach should be applied from a general point of view. Next, if that leads to pages with some such redundancy as described by the original poster, it is what is. If users in general have to bear presentation of redundant content, then from my point of view a user using a screen reader will have to bear the same.

Olaf


On 16 Aug 2015, at 10:46, Léonie Watson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>> From: Olaf Drümmer [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
>> Sent: 16 August 2015 00:33
>> Please keep in mind screen readers are just one out of many types of
>> assistive technologies/ways to access content, To change something just to
>> accommodate screen readers (or their users) tends be inappropriate.
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> Agreed. Do you think the heading (as a duplicate of a visible caption) would
> be beneficial to others? I couldn't immediately think of ways it might be -
> but that doesn't mean to say there aren't of course.
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> Léonie.
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