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From: Angela French
Date: Mon, Aug 29 2011 4:36PM
Subject: "tables" mode or "links" mode?
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Hello and thanks for your valuable contribution to my ongoing efforts to education myself on matters of accessibility!

I am aware that there is a "links" mode and a "forms" mode for screen readers such as JAWS. Is there also something such as a "tables" mode? How does a screen reader user decide what "mode" to put the device into to read the page?

If a web page has a complex table in it that also presents links to outside sources (say documents that can be downloaded, represented by a document icon), what mode is most likely to be employed by the user? In the above example, if the page was in links mode, would the user know what the document was all about since the context of the table was important to ascertain that?

(This is related to the last email I sent out about presenting documents for download).

Thanks,

Angela French
Internet Specialist
State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
360-704-4316
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
http://www.checkoutacollege.com<;http://www.checkoutacollege.com/>;

From: Lucy Greco
Date: Mon, Aug 29 2011 5:15PM
Subject: Re: "tables" mode or "links" mode?
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Hello:

Jaws does have a tables mode but much to my dismay when I work with students most people don't know how to use it. Its very simple, when you're in a table you can hold down the windows key and use up down to move in a column and left write to move across the row. If the table is tagged properly with titles and so on jaws will read the header of the row or column as you the developer set it with the tag. Older versions of jaws would assume that the top row is the header row and that the far left is the header column. With modern tables, this would often lead to sort bys being read as column headers and check boxes being read as row headers. So now the default behavior is to not assume. You should always tag tables appropriately and you can choose whatever column or row you want to be the header. So for example, the first column could be check boxes the second column can be ID numbers and the third column can be names, and so on. In this case, you may want to make the name co
lumn as the header, since number or check boxes may not make sense.

Hope this helps,

Lucy Greco
Assistive Technology Specialist
Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
(510) 643-7591
http://attlc.berkeley.edu
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu

From: Patrick Burke
Date: Mon, Aug 29 2011 5:24PM
Subject: Re: "tables" mode or "links" mode?
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Hi Angela,

There is some variation among screen readers, but basically there are
only three modes: one for navigating the virtual buffer (Jaws calls
it Virtual Cursor Mode), Forms Mode, and the newly popular
Application mode (where keystrokes are captured by a web
application). Generally the screen reader decides which is the best
mode to be in, unless you override the settings.

There are some typical commands available to users. These commands
pull out repeated structures from the HTML to create lists of items
for navigating quicly: Links, Form elements, Headings, divs, etc.
Frankly I wouldn't recommend using these as the *only* means of
navigating a page, but people often do, & here is where link text etc
can be confusing out of context. People (including myself) often
simply guess based on previous pages/experiences when deciding which
of these commands to use.

Other commands are always available (in Virtual Mode), such as Next
Heading, Next Table etc. These jump you through the buffer but don't
change anything else.

In Jaws, the table navigation commands simply become active when you
are in a table. If the table is marked up properly, you will get the
proper column, row & other info spoken while moving around with the
table commands. So if you had columns for DOC, PDF, & PPT formats,
users could move down the title column for the file they want, then
move across to the desired format. (A table summary explaining how
the table is organized would still be helpful.)

Overall, though, I like Birkir's idea of using a combobox for year, &
including info about file size.

Patrick

At 03:37 PM 8/29/2011, Angela French wrote:
>Hello and thanks for your valuable contribution to my ongoing
>efforts to education myself on matters of accessibility!
>
>I am aware that there is a "links" mode and a "forms" mode for
>screen readers such as JAWS. Is there also something such as a
>"tables" mode? How does a screen reader user decide what "mode" to
>put the device into to read the page?
>
>If a web page has a complex table in it that also presents links to
>outside sources (say documents that can be downloaded, represented
>by a document icon), what mode is most likely to be employed by the
>user? In the above example, if the page was in links mode, would
>the user know what the document was all about since the context of
>the table was important to ascertain that?
>
>(This is related to the last email I sent out about presenting
>documents for download).
>
>Thanks,
>
>Angela French
>Internet Specialist
>State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
>360-704-4316
> = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
>http://www.checkoutacollege.com<;http://www.checkoutacollege.com/>;
>
>