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PDf Table with one column "artifacted"

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Oct 24, 2019 12:29PM

I am working on a wide PDF table of 16 columns that is broken into two
tables of 8 columns so that it can be printed in hardcopy form across a
page that is then folded down the middle, thus forming a booklet. Each pair
of two facing pages thus present the two halves of a table. (I hope this
makes sense.) Users can opt for a digital version of the booklet, and users
with vision disabilities indeed do so; they can use AT to access the
tables, but because each table is implemented as two separate tables (one
on the left-side page with the first 8 columns and one on the right-side
page with the remaining 8 columns) the row headers from the left-side table
do not apply to the table on the facing right-side page. These row headers
are far two wordy to bear literal reproduction on the right-side page --
and anyway the customer wants to maintain the current visual appearance of
the two tables as being a single table (with a fold in the middle).
I tried creating a single table with a white-space (borderless) column down
the middle, so that the physical fold would be in the middle of the
white-space column. This sort of works, although the screen readers get a
bit confused when the user steps into an empty "fold cell". (An SR
basically announces "blank". Playing with ALT text on the cells didn't
really help much.) What I wanted to do was "artifact" the entire fold
column so that screen readers would ignore it altogether. Then the user
would navigate to next and previous cells skipping over the artifacted
"fold cell". But I find that although the tags make it clear we have a
single table the mere presence of this artifacted column in the middle
makes the screen reader see 2 tables, not 1. It actually says that there
are 2 tables of 8 columns, not 1 table of 17. The artifacted "fold column"
is interpreted as the table boundary of each table, for some reason! So
this is a failure.

Has anyone successfully created a table with a column down the middle set
to artifact, so a screen reader would just ignore it but still see a single
table?

Thanks
A

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