WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Joining Column Headers with Columns

for

From: Paul Bohman
Date: Sep 18, 2001 3:28PM

[Tim] Actually, we are looking to associate the information between 2 tables. The first table contains the headings. The second table contains the content.

my response: Unfortunately, this would create invalid HTML. A heading only applies to the table that it belongs to. I suppose that some screen readers/speaking browsers might interpret it in the way that you want, but the results are bound to be unpredictable across versions, browsers, and adaptive technologies. I would strongly recommend against this. If you have only one target audience with only one browser version with one adaptive technology (e.g. Jaws 3.7), you can experiment and find out if it works for those limited circumstances. As long as you're sure that other scenarios don't exist for a particular page, then it would work for that audience. Otherwise your results will be mixed.

Paul Bohman
Technology Coordinator
WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
www.webaim.org
Utah State University
www.usu.edu