WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Can I make my family tree chart accessible?

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Aug 1, 2003 7:15PM

The question really should be not whether the _chart_ can be made
accessible, but whether the _information_ within the chart can be
made accessible.

One technique for doing that is to make the chart itself directly
accessible. Another technique is to provide an alternative
format -- a longdesc link, basically (although not using that
exact attribute) -- which provides a directly accessible version
of the information.

To make the chart accessible, you don't need to use CSS. In fact,
going to CSS would likely break whatever accessibility exists!
Instead, you need to stick to HTML tables -- as this is tabular
data, of a sort -- and make full use of the various table attributes
which enhance accessibility and show relationships between cells
and headers. I haven't had the time to sit down and do it yet for
your table -- and it will probably be pretty difficult -- but it
is certainly possible.

What you will be using here is not the ability of screen readers to
read tables in linear order, but instead the ability of the screen
reader user to navigate, cell-by-cell, through each row and column
of the table, and query the browser for the applicable headers (and
axis and scope) that relate to that cell. You can't do that if you
are using <div> and CSS to create a visual layout -- the table cells
you use (or should use) are part of the structure of your data.

To make an alternate version of this page, I'd suggest using nested
<ul> or <ol> tags, as they are good at creating a tree structure
(which is what a family tree is). However, there is less direct
access to structural information (such as cell headers) in this case.

If you make an alternate version, simply put a pair of links before
your table that say something like this:

[ <a href="#skipchart">Skip family tree</a>
| <a href="tree.html">Alternate text version of family tree</a> ]

Hope this helps.

--Kynn

On Saturday, July 19, 2003, at 10:34 AM, Brent Ashworth wrote:

> Hi. I created a chart of several generations of my ancestors by using
> a table with lots of cells