WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Guidance for HTML data table special cases?

for

From: Meacham, Steve - FSA, Kansas City, MO
Date: Jul 25, 2017 1:20PM

JAWS (what I use) says 'blank' on empty cells and those containing only whitespace. When they are few and far between, it's great, and nothing other than 'blank' seems any better. Those cells being blank are significant and should stand out as much as cells containing data.

There comes a threshold where the empty cells are so numerous that they effectively face into the background and become unimportant. The visual user's eye is then drawn to where the text is - the data. At a glance. Conveniently. But a to a non-visual user, the whitespace doesn't fade away, and you end up visualizing the whole table, and the concentrations of non-blank cells aren't apparent. We have to listen to all of it, blanks and all. Laborious. Verbose, Not convenient.