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Thread: Reading of tables with JAWS

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Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)

From: Rakesh chowdary
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 4:18AM
Subject: Reading of tables with JAWS
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Hi all,

We have a problem with reading of tables with JAWS.
Our page is a search results page in which the results are displayed
in a tabular form. For appearance the table looks like a table but
JAWS is unable to recognise as a table for e.g. If you press "t" with
JAWS its reading "No tables found in the page".
We provided the role attribute (role="grid"). JAWS is able to
recognise this table grid but it is not passing the xhtml validation.
Any thoughts?

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 5:03AM
Subject: Re: Reading of tables with JAWS
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"For appearance the table looks like a table but JAWS is unable to recognise as a table for e.g. If you press "t" with JAWS its reading "No tables found in the page".
We provided the role attribute (role="grid"). JAWS is able to recognise this table grid but it is not passing the xhtml validation.
Any thoughts?"

For the quick nav key to work, the standard table code needs to be in the page. I've run a couple of quick tests with Jaws 11, which seem to suggest that the role="grid" attribute isn't recognised by Jaws unless it's applied to an actual table.


When the role=grid attribute is applied to a table, Jaws reports something along the lines of "Editable table with x columns and y rows". Ordinarily, Jaws would report "Table with x columns and y rows".

Jaws didn't recognise the grid role when I applied it directly to a div. The ARIA spec seems to suggest that a hierarchy of roles is needed within the grid code, which I didn't have time to experiment with I'm afraid. If you have an example available, I'd be interested to explore a more complex example though.


Regards,
Léonie.

--
Nomensa - humanising technology

Léonie Watson | Director of Accessibility
t. +44 (0)117 929 7333

From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 8:33AM
Subject: Re: Reading of tables with JAWS
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On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Léonie Watson wrote:
> If you have an example available, I'd be interested to explore a more complex example though.

As would I. What you describe doesn't seem to fit into the detection
heuristics described at http://webaim.org/blog/jaws-ate-my-tables/
Because it's a large table, assuming it has proper table headers that
are marked up as <th>'s and have an assigned scope, JAWS *should*
identify it as data table.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org

From: Jon Gunderson
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 9:24AM
Subject: Re: Reading of tables with JAWS
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Can you send a link to the page with the results?

Do you provide a SUMMARY attribute for the TABLE element and TH elements for the headers?

These are usually the trigger for JAWS to recognize a tabular data table.

Best practices for data tables:
http://html.cita.uiuc.edu/nav/dtable/

You should NOT be using ROLE=GRID unless you are also providing keyboard support for focus management and using the other GRID related ARIA markup for creating an accessible GRID. See example of an accessible GRID:

http://test.cita.illinois.edu/aria/grid/grid4.php


Jon

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:48:44 +0530
>From: Rakesh chowdary < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
>Subject: [WebAIM] Reading of tables with JAWS
>To: WebAIM Discussion List < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
>
>Hi all,
>
>We have a problem with reading of tables with JAWS.
>Our page is a search results page in which the results are displayed
>in a tabular form. For appearance the table looks like a table but
>JAWS is unable to recognise as a table for e.g. If you press "t" with
>JAWS its reading "No tables found in the page".
>We provided the role attribute (role="grid"). JAWS is able to
>recognise this table grid but it is not passing the xhtml validation.
>Any thoughts?
>