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Re: Accessibility in Financial Tables in HTML

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Oct 12, 2015 3:15PM

Hi Rio,

> On 12.10.2015, at 22:42, Julie Lewis < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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?

the biggest impact will be for text-to-speech based presentation, and the question boils down to: do text-to-speech technologies typically speak out parentheses, or minus signs (which may be coded as dashes or hyphens)? What about - 2553? What about −2553 (that's the mathematical minus sign before the number)?

Text-to-speech on Mac OS X 10.10 speaks
minus 2,553 for the ‘usual minus/dash/hyphen' (U+002D)
minus sign 2,553 for the mathematical minus sign (U+2212)
2,555 for - 2,553 (because of the space character)
2,555 for 2,553 in parentheses

From a pragmatic point of view I would choose the ‘usual minus/dash/hyphen' (more typical) or mathematical minus sign (more "correct" but some text-to-speech technologies might not be prepared to speak out much outside "ordinary characters").

> 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?

this does not have anything to do with accessibility, but with usability

> In the past we figured the more info in the table the better,

this can be wrong from a usability point of view - because there is already so much information in such tables, they do not get any better if you add more.


Just my 2 cents…

Olaf



> 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
> > > >