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Re: Accessibility in Financial Tables in HTML

for

From: Julie Lewis
Date: Oct 13, 2015 12:54PM

Sorry if I don¹t do this right ­ it¹s been a looong time since I
participated in an email only list-serv.

I wrote:
> 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?

Olaf said:
Å this does not have anything to do with accessibility, but with usability

I reply:

I disagree. From a usability perspective it¹s pretty clear that less is
more. The question is whether a non-sighted user will have enough context
to figure out what the numbers mean if they are just traversing the table.

The header for percent change is self-explanatory, but the headers for the
dollar amounts aren¹t unless the user actually listens to the title.

Since HTML5 has deprecated the table summary tag, (why oh why did they do
that?) that may not be an option going forward.

It¹s a bummer that MacOS doesn¹t read the parentheses, since that¹s a much
cleaner way of representing negatives than relying on a dash.

Regards,
Rio