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Accessibility in Financial Tables in HTML

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From: Julie Lewis
Date: Oct 12, 2015 2:42PM

A couple questions about accessibility for financial tables.

Consider:

http://www.texastransparency.org/State_Finance/Budget_Finance/Reports/Certification_Revenue_Estimate/cre1415/table1.php

Question 1: In printed formats the convention for reporting negative numbers is to put them in parentheses (2,553). Is that acceptable for accessibility, or is -2,553
better?

Question 2: The title indicates that the number in the tables are in "millions of dollars," But that is nowhere in the table headers. The printed version of the table has dollar signs in front of the numbers on the first and last rows and percent signs only on the first and last rows. Does that provide enough context? Or should every cell have $ or % explicitly called out?

In the past we figured the more info in the table the better, but it's a battle with the finance folks every time we produce these tables.

I cannot find best practices or guidelines for this anywhere on the web, and at StackOverflow they snarkily said this didn't have anything to do with code.

Thanks,
Rio Brewster