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Re: Table Column Headings

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 3, 2003 7:47AM

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Tim Harshbarger wrote:

> Is there a way to hide a table's header row so that it is not visible in the
> browser, but so that screen readers will still speak the header row
> information?

Not really. Why would you do that? The summary attribute in <table> is
supposed to be used for purposes like that, i.e. to provide information
(on the structure of the table) that is optionally available but not
normally visible. The support is not very good. The only safe way to make
such information surely available is to make it part of the document
content proper, normally before the table.

The point is that a screen reader reads what there is on the screen.

But if you really want, you might experiment with the idea of making the
font size of the table row very small and the text color the same as the
background color. As far as I can guess, screen readers would still read
it normally, whereas people using normal graphic browsers would not see
it. But this is somewhat risky. What if a person with reduced eyesight
surfs around with a graphic browser set to override settings on pages,
using a user-specified font size and user-specified colors?

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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