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Re: Presenting a table without any data

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From: Meacham, Steve - FSA, Kansas City, MO
Date: Feb 21, 2017 4:42PM

Thank you, Ryan and everyone for your help.

In my haste, I may have oversimplified. Here's the exact scenario: A master record is created on one page. The user then navigates to this "add receipts" page, which has a form to fill out on top with an "add" button, and a table at the bottom that accumulates the receipts and presumably allows the user to go back and edit or remove them one by one if necessary. Presumably they can come back to this page at a later time, after some receipts have already been added, and see the table already populated.

Does that clarify? I've attached a really low-res screen print of what I just described. That, BTW, is what I was given to analyze.

- Steve

P.S. Oh...they won't use "caption" or "h1"-"h6" elements, either, because they're ugly and clutter the page. They prefer to wrap entire portions of the page in "fieldset" elements. At a glance, there are even more things worse with the page, but for reasons you can probably imagine, they are off limits to me for now. I apologize for my blatant frustration.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Ryan E. Benson
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 5:18 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Presenting a table without any data

Steve,

I agree with you providing a header row could be confusing, though I don't think many users would jump into the table if they know they need to search first. Why not met your devs half-way, and throw "no receipts have been added" into a caption tag, which gets removed or updated as the table populates

--
Ryan E. Benson

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Meacham, Steve - FSA, Kansas City, MO < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Imagine you have a dynamic web page that retrieves a list of receipts,
> but none matched the query. Or, imagine one that is a data entry page
> on the top, and at the bottom is table that displays them as they are
> added, but you start out with none.
>
> I've advised my developers that displaying only the single header row
> is inappropriate; that there are several ways this could be
> disorienting or cryptic, such as a user wondering if it is proper
> behavior or simply something that was done in such a way as to be
> inaccessible to them. Or, wondering what their path forward should be. There are more.
>
> So, I told them when there are no records to display to add a single
> row that makes that says something like "No receipts have been added"
> that spans an entire table row. It goes away once there are rows of
> actual data to display.
>
> So my question is: Am I just being overwrought? They're argument is
> that this is unnecessary "dummy text" that will confuse their users.
>
> My other question is: If I'm not out of line, then how could I justify
> it to them? They've escalated it to senior management who are now
> second guessing my guidance. They want to see something official that
> says they are supposed to do it this way.
>
> Please help...
> Steven Meacham, ICT Accessibility Program Manager
> +1 (816) 926-1942<tel:+18169261942>
> FSA Section 508 Program<https://wiki.tools.fsa.usda.gov/x/AgCoAw>
>
>
>
>
>
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