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Re: Lengthy Tables, Lists, and Screen Readers

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From: glen walker
Date: Jul 13, 2018 8:57AM

Given the tags of your example, I presume you're creating a PDF document?
Are you creating it directly in acrobat or do you have a word doc (or some
other format) that you're saving as PDF?

Is there also an HTML equivalent? HTML obviously won't have a "page
boundary" problem.

Personally, I prefer navigating through a table rather than a list when
using a screen reader. I like the row/col header announcements before the
cell value, and it just feels natural to me to use ctrl+alt+arrowkeys to
walk the grid in any direction I want. (Or go into table mode and use the
plain arrow keys.) With a list, I'm sort of forced to navigate it
sequentially. I can't jump from the 3rd item in one list to the 3rd item
of the next list like I can with a table.

Is your table only 2 columns? The row header and the data cell? That's
the only scenario I can think of that wouldn't have column headers,
although even then I think column headers would be helpful as you navigate
horizontally between the data cell and the row header.

Have you confirmed that the tags for your data cells that span across a
page boundary are marked up properly?

If you happen to be using Word to create your tables and are saving the
document as PDF, just to rule out the obvious, have you turned OFF the
"allow row to break across pages" option?

I'm just trying to toss a few ideas out there that might spark other ideas.