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Re: Accessibility in Financial Tables in HTML

for

From: _mallory
Date: Oct 15, 2015 5:11AM

It also can't hurt to state, before the table (or maybe after, but
better before) how you denote negatives, or if the dollars are in
millions (or that it's in dollars at all)... There was a time when
I did not know of the (parentheses) convention for negative numbers,
and only learned of it when I was old enough to do taxes. So it
doesn't hurt to tell people in a quick short sentence stuff that
might be obvious or well-known to the majority of readers anyway.

If someone knows or suspects their AT won't read out a symbol,
knowing beforehand that a symbol is being used can let people
decide if they need to fiddle with their punctuation first. In
any case, can't hurt to say it.

This can give you more freedom inside the table itself.

_mallory

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 02:29:03PM -0700, Don Mauck wrote:
> From my understanding of this thread, it seems to me that each "row" should have the math sign relevant to that row. I am however, only thinking from a screen readers perspective and realize that there are other contributing factors. What I'm not clear on, is if the intent is that each row could have a different math sign and that there will be columns of data related to a column heading.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julie Lewis [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 12:55 PM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessibility in Financial Tables in HTML
>
> 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
>
> > > > > > >