WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Tables with irregular headers

for

From: glen walker
Date: Apr 15, 2021 12:26PM

When navigating across row 1, I can sort of see your point.

With NVDA, it only says "Mars" and then "Venus", so it's only announcing
just that header.
With JAWS, it says "Produced Mars" and "Produced Venus"

I can (sort of) understand why JAWS is doing that. "Mars" is a cell in the
table (a header cell but a cell nonetheless) so JAWS is trying to announce
any headers that go with that (header) cell, which is "Produced". Sort
of.

Both "Produced" and "Sold" are header cells so why did JAWS only decide to
announce "Produced" when navigating to the "Mars" cell and not "Sold"? I
can't answer that. Perhaps it's a JAWS-ism.

But I think that might be beside the point. In your real world case, are
you trying to control what the screen reader says when you navigate the
header cells? I'm not sure you should do that. You said "I would prefer
to hear..." but are you a typical screen reader user? You have to be
careful when you start thinking about how *you* would want things announced
as opposed to what your *users* expect to be announced.