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Re: Inaccessible table

for

From: glen walker
Date: May 24, 2023 8:19AM

It sounds like the HTML "table" is just a series of divs/spans with no real
table related roles and that keyboard event handlers are allowing the arrow
keys to navigate.

In general, it's much easier to make an HTML table accessible than it is to
make a PDF table accessible. The PDF is typically generated from another
file (Word doc, design doc, etc) but those other files typically have
minimal support for creating accessible content so you often have to
manually remediate the PDF to make it accessible. If any contents of the
table have to change, you have to do that process all over.

I understand your html table comes from a third party vendor and you don't
have control over changing it but speaking as a developer myself, there are
sometimes ways to work around that. First you have to check the
documentation of the component carefully because there might be ways of
improving its accessibility. Sometimes I have been able to "post-process"
the generated HTML code and could inject ARIA into the generated code. It
wasn't ideal, but it helped.

Your main question was "is it good enough to have an accessible
alternative?". Yes, it's "good enough" to pass WCAG but that's only if
your main concern is passing a minimal baseline.