WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients

for

From: chagnon
Date: Sep 24, 2021 1:02AM


I know the PDF/UA-1 standard only requires column headers.
That's a shortcoming I'm hoping our ISO committee will be able to bring into the next edition, PDF/UA-2.

As a community, we need to get all of the accessibility standards on board with row headers.

Then, get our software manufacturers to automatically create the tools to do this. At this time MS Word and PowerPoint automatically set row headers as the programs' defaults, but Adobe InDesign fails here:

First, the designer must manually designate the row headers — there isn't an automatic default setting for them like in Word.
And second, there is no way for the designer to manually designate row headers.

That means row headers must be added after the PDF is exported. It's a gruesome task to fix tables, especially given that InDesign is often used to create long data-intensive documents with multi-page tables. Imagine setting row headers by hand for a 50-page table. O M G.

We need to tell Adobe and Microsoft what we need for accessible documents because they don't have a clue.

— — —
Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED>
— — —
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
— — —
Latest blog-newsletter – Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text