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Re: Lengthy Tables, Lists, and Screen Readers

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jul 13, 2018 1:50PM

Hi Alan,

I'm confused…

The problem is when table-cells span pages, yes?

Are you tagging the tables irrespective of the pages they span? If so I don't see why you should be having a problem.

Duff.

> On Jul 13, 2018, at 15:47, Alan Zaitchik < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Thank you, Glen. Unfortunately I have no access to the original Word document for this legacy pdf. It has to be delivered back to the client as a PDF, too.
> Another (similar) pdf will be arriving soon together with its source Word doc. I will certainly try to restructure the tables in that case with the "do not span page boundary" setting for data cells. The problem I foresee is that some data cells in these documents contain lists that are just too "long". Shrinking fonts and making extra columns in a cell is likely to prove unacceptable visually to the client. I'll have to give it a try and judge the results.
> As for my present document, I have just the PDF. Acrobat is pretty horrible for editing so I may have to go with Lists.
> A
>
>> On Jul 13, 2018, at 10:57 AM, glen walker < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
> > > >