WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Acalog use of tables without role equals presentation

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jun 15, 2021 2:05PM

On 15/06/2021 19:20, Hayman, Douglass wrote:
> When using NVDA and clicking T for navigating through found Tables it sometimes appears to see them and read cell by cell showing that if they'd done role="presentation" it would have been a much better markup. Other times though I'm seeing that when I hit T that I get back a no tables found, ditto for shift plus T with no previous table found.

Browser use heuristics to determine whether a table is or isn't a data
table (as a sort of defense mechanism, because historically there's been
so much rubbish markup out in the wild where literally everyhting was a
table) and whether to expose it as such to the accessibility API. These
heuristics are hit and miss (which is why they can't really be relied
on, and the best solution is indeed to add an explicit
role="presentation" to tables...but, in some rare case, also the
opposite - having to add explicit role="table" to make sure an actual
data table isn't misdiagnosed by the heuristics).

See this presentation (there used to be a video, but it seems to have
been purged from the web)
https://speakerdeck.com/edds/what-even-is-a-table-a-quick-look-at-accessibility-apis
for some details. While relatively old, it still mostly holds true.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke