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From: Julie Lewis
Date: Oct 15, 2015 12:39PM

Great points all. Thank you.

Don - the table isn't set up that way.

The units are specific to the columns. The left has the revenue source,
the next few columns are the amounts in US dollars by year. So the column
header is "year" not "amount". And the right-most column is "percent
change". That one is self-explanatory.

By default, the screen reader will just read the numbers from left to
right - which is pretty meaningless.
If they are reading by column, then "percent change" is self-explanatory,
but "year" isn't. A single dollar sign in the first row might help. But
is that enough?

To make things even more complicated, there are multiple tables and some
are in thousands of dollars and some are in millions of dollars.

We have literally thousands of tables of our web site, so we need to trade
off what's reasonable from a development standpoint with what is needed
for accessibility (and usability) for all users.

In some cases I can get away with tweaking the table format, but in many
others I can't do that. The people creating the tables have been
formatting them in very specific ways for many years, so I need to be able
to justify those changes. (They get ruffled if I don't use double
underlines and leave extra space before a total.)

The secondary problem of putting negative numbers in parentheses wouldn't
be a problem if the screen readers read the parentheses, but it doesn't
sound like they do that consistently.

Regards,
Julie Lewis




On 10/15/15, 1:00 PM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of
<EMAIL REMOVED> "
< <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>On 10/15/15, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>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.
>>>
>>>