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Re: Acalog use of tables without role equals presentation

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From: glen walker
Date: Jun 15, 2021 1:17PM

Whether a tool flags the table or not or whether a screen reader recognizes
the table or not is somewhat irrelevant to whether it's a real problem. I
think most tools will flag a table that does not have any header cells
(<th>) as a potential presentation table. Some screen readers have
heuristics built in to decide if a table is a real table so that can
sometimes mask the problem.

If I were auditing http://dillard.catalog.acalog.com/ (as in your video), I
would mark the tables as failures. They are definitely being used for
layout and should be marked as such (role="presentation").

Should tables be used for layout? That depends on your "purist" beliefs.
Some people think tables should never be used for layout and that CSS
should always be used to get grid layouts. Others find that tables are
easy to use to line things up but perhaps that's because the person hasn't
investigated CSS grid layouts enough. I'm not going to pass judgement
either way. I might make UX suggestions but if someone really wants to
code a certain way, then I will give them recommendations on how to make
that coding style accessible (such as adding role="presentation").

But one other thing to keep in mind with layout tables, they can sometimes
affect the reading order (WCAG 1.3.2). For the Dillard page, I didn't see
a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

As an aside, the "Campus Map" link in the left navigation fails WCAG 2.5.3
because visually it shows "Campus Map" but the aria-label for the link is
"Download PDF of Catalog User Guide".