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Accessible Tables - Scope and Presentation Links

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From: Randy Pearson
Date: Apr 2, 2005 11:43AM


Musing over the refactoring of our table rendering classes, two related
accessibility issues have arisen.

1) Paged Recordset Links: If a table is displaying one page of a paged
recordset (ex: items 1-20 of a query result), where/how would you place the
links to navigate to Next, Previous, etc.?

- If you put them *outside* the (above, and perhaps repeated
beneath), is it semantically clear that the links pertain to the table?

- If instead you force the links *into* the table (perhaps a colspan'd row
in the and/or ), do you complicate the structure of the
table, such that otherwise unnecessary scope or header/id markup is needed
to properly orient some users?

Rather than "inventing" our own answer, we wanted to check if any good
practices have been identified.


2) For sortable tables, we've been using the practice of hyperlinking the
column headers. Example:


Date


This seems to be a typical UI approach, but we wanted to ensure this didn't
harm the accessibility of the table.

Thanks for any input!

-- Randy

Randy Pearson
Cycla Corporation
mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED>