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Re: Another rookie question: tables that use a heading rather than a caption

for

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Mar 29, 2017 1:31PM

All:

For those who may not know of this, perhaps this tutorial on tables will
help.


http://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/


Especially for new folks (not meaning you, Jeremy, so *please* don't
take this personally!), I see a lot of new folks who ask questions where
they think an accessibility question has a "yes/no" answer. But such
questions rarely do. Often, it's important to understand context/see
code, and even then, the answer turns out to be "it depends."

I see a lot of new folks on this list lately, so I mention this in case
it will help many. Also, this list is archived (with one of the
best/most navigable archives of which I'm aware), so clear subject lines
may cut down on question repeats.

And I'm not the list manager; I just speak from being on this list for
years and years and years.


Now, back to the people who will really try to answer your question,
Jeremy. My experience tells me that often, accessibility is as much
about philosophy as anything else.

But lots of folks want it to be easier than that.


In your case . . . if there are a lot of tables on a page, making it
possible to navigate among them by headings is helpful. I don't believe
heading and caption would serve the same purpose. At the same time, all
screen readers that I know of have the ability to navigate by "table,"
so some could see heading navigation as redundant. Depends on your goals
and what you think your expected audiences will do.


Jennifer



On 3/29/2017 12:08 PM, Jeremy Echols wrote:
> We have a lot of tables which (I think) make sense to be under a heading (as in the "h2" or "h3" elements). Should we also have a caption for these tables? Should we use a caption instead of a heading?
> > > >