WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Irregular table woes

for

From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Jul 7, 2017 4:45PM

I am working on a PDF that is essentially just a very long table. The PDF
was created from either Word or Excel...  I cannot tell and have no access to
the original.
My problem is that the table appears visually to have 6 columns, where the
6th column is empty. There is not even a TH at its head. There are 5 TH
tags in the first row and 5 TD tags in every subsequent row. (Mind you, I
am not 100% certain that there are 6 column in the table, but it seems to
be so.
When I check for Accessibility in Acrobat it tells the that the table
fails the Regularity requirement. I assume it somehow has to do with the
6th column and the absence of a tag for that column in each row.
This is a really looooooong table, and the thought of going through it
manually adding an empty <TD> to each row doesn't thrill me. But what's
worse, I wonder if this is doing the AT user any favor. The phantom 6th
cell of each row is always going to be empty.
It would be nice if I could just 'drop the 6th column' from within Acrobat
using the Edit Page option, but I have not been able to do that. Searching
on the web turned up contradictory pieces of advice, and in the end none
of them worked for me.
So which is worse? Leaving the table 'irregular' or manually adding an
empty 6th cell to each row?
I suppose there is the option of setting the 5th cell in each row to have
a column span of 2 but doesn't that offend against some other rule?
All suggestions are welcome!
A