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Thread: does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
Number of posts in this thread: 11 (In chronological order)
From: Lucy GRECO
Date: Wed, Sep 22 2021 1:19PM
Subject: does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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hello:
i was wondering if any one else finds a lot of tables with out proper
colume and row hedders. i would say that about half of the tables i look
at do have colume hedders but most don't have row hedders at all why is
this something that keeps happening thanks lucy
Lucia Greco
Web Accessibility Evangelist
IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
Follow me on twitter @accessaces
From: Jared Smith
Date: Wed, Sep 22 2021 2:07PM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with yourclients
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Lucy -
The WebAIM Million analysis (https://webaim.org/projects/million/) found 1,533,402 tables on the home pages of the top one million web sites in early 2021. This was down from almost 1.9 million in 2020. Only 140,793 (9.2%) of the tables had valid data table markup. While it's difficult to know how many of those 1.5+ million tables were data tables as opposed to layout tables, this shows that accessible tables are rather uncommon on the web.
Jared
From: Lucy GRECO
Date: Wed, Sep 22 2021 2:27PM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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thanks for confirming its not just me wanting some thing that people can'
produce smile
Lucia Greco
Web Accessibility Evangelist
IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
Follow me on twitter @accessaces
On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 1:07 PM Jared Smith < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Lucy -
>
> The WebAIM Million analysis (https://webaim.org/projects/million/) found
> 1,533,402 tables on the home pages of the top one million web sites in
> early 2021. This was down from almost 1.9 million in 2020. Only 140,793
> (9.2%) of the tables had valid data table markup. While it's difficult to
> know how many of those 1.5+ million tables were data tables as opposed to
> layout tables, this shows that accessible tables are rather uncommon on the
> web.
>
> Jared
>
> > > > >
From: glen walker
Date: Wed, Sep 22 2021 5:48PM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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Interesting. So if I do my basic math and divide 1.5 million tables by 1
million home pages, that's 1.5 tables on the home page on average. I don't
recall seeing tables on home pages very often. It would be interesting to
see how many real data tables there are on home pages.
Anecdotally, Lucy, I'm finding more and more data tables with column
headings but I rarely find any row headings. Row headings are so useful
when navigating down a column with a screen reader.
Glen
From: Lucy GRECO
Date: Wed, Sep 22 2021 6:11PM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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yes glen i agree like i said about have of the tables i see have good
col headings but only one i have worked with a lot has row headings
Lucia Greco
Web Accessibility Evangelist
IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
Follow me on twitter @accessaces
On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 4:48 PM glen walker < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Interesting. So if I do my basic math and divide 1.5 million tables by 1
> million home pages, that's 1.5 tables on the home page on average. I don't
> recall seeing tables on home pages very often. It would be interesting to
> see how many real data tables there are on home pages.
>
> Anecdotally, Lucy, I'm finding more and more data tables with column
> headings but I rarely find any row headings. Row headings are so useful
> when navigating down a column with a screen reader.
>
> Glen
> > > > >
From: Jerra Strong
Date: Thu, Sep 23 2021 10:59AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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Lucy,
One reason I can see contributing to this is automated accessibility
checkers tend to only check tables for column headers, and consider a table
with any column headers "good", even if the table isn't structured all that
well. And depending on the table, whether row headers should or should not
be used can be a judgement call based on the content.
On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 5:12 PM Lucy GRECO < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> yes glen i agree like i said about have of the tables i see have good
> col headings but only one i have worked with a lot has row headings
> Lucia Greco
> Web Accessibility Evangelist
> IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
> University of California, Berkeley
> (510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
> http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
> Follow me on twitter @accessaces
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 4:48 PM glen walker < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> > Interesting. So if I do my basic math and divide 1.5 million tables by 1
> > million home pages, that's 1.5 tables on the home page on average. I
> don't
> > recall seeing tables on home pages very often. It would be interesting
> to
> > see how many real data tables there are on home pages.
> >
> > Anecdotally, Lucy, I'm finding more and more data tables with column
> > headings but I rarely find any row headings. Row headings are so useful
> > when navigating down a column with a screen reader.
> >
> > Glen
> > > > > > > > > >
> > > > >
From: Lucy GRECO
Date: Thu, Sep 23 2021 11:12AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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Hello IF THAT IS THE CASE WE NEED TO GET ON THE W3C TO FIX THE DEFANISHIONS
IN SILVER. YES I DO THINK THAT A 2 COLUME TABLE SOME TIMES DOES NOT NEED
ROW HEADERS BUT THEY ALWAYS AND I MEAN ALWAYS DO HELP
Lucia Greco
Web Accessibility Evangelist
IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
Follow me on twitter @accessaces
On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 10:00 AM Jerra Strong < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Lucy,
>
> One reason I can see contributing to this is automated accessibility
> checkers tend to only check tables for column headers, and consider a table
> with any column headers "good", even if the table isn't structured all that
> well. And depending on the table, whether row headers should or should not
> be used can be a judgement call based on the content.
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 5:12 PM Lucy GRECO < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> > yes glen i agree like i said about have of the tables i see have good
> > col headings but only one i have worked with a lot has row headings
> > Lucia Greco
> > Web Accessibility Evangelist
> > IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
> > University of California, Berkeley
> > (510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
> > http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
> > Follow me on twitter @accessaces
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 4:48 PM glen walker < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> wrote:
> >
> > > Interesting. So if I do my basic math and divide 1.5 million tables
> by 1
> > > million home pages, that's 1.5 tables on the home page on average. I
> > don't
> > > recall seeing tables on home pages very often. It would be interesting
> > to
> > > see how many real data tables there are on home pages.
> > >
> > > Anecdotally, Lucy, I'm finding more and more data tables with column
> > > headings but I rarely find any row headings. Row headings are so
> useful
> > > when navigating down a column with a screen reader.
> > >
> > > Glen
> > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > >
> > > > >
From: glen walker
Date: Thu, Sep 23 2021 11:44AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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>
> One reason I can see contributing to this is automated accessibility
> checkers tend to only check tables for column headers
That's probably a good observation and is exactly why we shouldn't rely on
scanning tools to find accessibility issues. They might be a good place to
*start* if you're new to testing for accessibility but should not be relied
on to find all problems. If you visually see a table on the page and the
scanning tool doesn't flag it as a problem, that doesn't mean the table
doesn't have a problem. You have to get your hands dirty and look at the
html code behind the scenes.
> And depending on the table, whether row headers should or should not
> be used can be a judgement call based on the content.
>
Theoretically, it might be a judgement call, but I rarely find a table
where row headers are not helpful (other than maybe a small 2-row 2-column
table). There is usually one cell (column) in the table that can be used
to identify the row and is a good candidate to be the row header.
From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Fri, Sep 24 2021 1:02AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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I know the PDF/UA-1 standard only requires column headers.
That's a shortcoming I'm hoping our ISO committee will be able to bring into the next edition, PDF/UA-2.
As a community, we need to get all of the accessibility standards on board with row headers.
Then, get our software manufacturers to automatically create the tools to do this. At this time MS Word and PowerPoint automatically set row headers as the programs' defaults, but Adobe InDesign fails here:
First, the designer must manually designate the row headers â there isn't an automatic default setting for them like in Word.
And second, there is no way for the designer to manually designate row headers.
That means row headers must be added after the PDF is exported. It's a gruesome task to fix tables, especially given that InDesign is often used to create long data-intensive documents with multi-page tables. Imagine setting row headers by hand for a 50-page table. O M G.
We need to tell Adobe and Microsoft what we need for accessible documents because they don't have a clue.
â â â
Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
â â â
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
â â â
Latest blog-newsletter â Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text
From: Steve Green
Date: Fri, Sep 24 2021 3:36AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimaticwith your clients
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There should not be an automatic default setting for row headers because it would be inappropriate in many cases. Just a few days ago I had to spend ages changing inappropriate row headers into data cells in a PDF that had been authored in Word.
Of course there must be a way to manually designate row headers. And multiple levels of headers need to be supported too - we see a lot of Excel tables that need them, but there is no way to do it.
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > On Behalf Of = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Sent: 24 September 2021 08:02
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
I know the PDF/UA-1 standard only requires column headers.
That's a shortcoming I'm hoping our ISO committee will be able to bring into the next edition, PDF/UA-2.
As a community, we need to get all of the accessibility standards on board with row headers.
Then, get our software manufacturers to automatically create the tools to do this. At this time MS Word and PowerPoint automatically set row headers as the programs' defaults, but Adobe InDesign fails here:
First, the designer must manually designate the row headers â there isn't an automatic default setting for them like in Word.
And second, there is no way for the designer to manually designate row headers.
That means row headers must be added after the PDF is exported. It's a gruesome task to fix tables, especially given that InDesign is often used to create long data-intensive documents with multi-page tables. Imagine setting row headers by hand for a 50-page table. O M G.
We need to tell Adobe and Microsoft what we need for accessible documents because they don't have a clue.
â â â
Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = â â â
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes â â â Latest blog-newsletter â Simple Guide to Writing Alt-Text
From: Duff Johnson
Date: Fri, Sep 24 2021 4:45AM
Subject: Re: [EXT] does every one else ind tables are problimatic with your clients
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> I know the PDF/UA-1 standard only requires column headers.
Not so. PDF/UA-1, clause 7.5 does not distinguish between column and row headers in terms of requirements.
> That's a shortcoming I'm hoping our ISO committee will be able to bring into the next edition, PDF/UA-2.
As of the current draft PDF/UA-2 does indeed require that header cells - if present - be unambiguous with respect to scope.
> Then, get our software manufacturers to automatically create the tools to do this. At this time MS Word and PowerPoint automatically set row headers as the programs' defaults, but Adobe InDesign fails here:
If they are "automatically" setting headers this is probably a mistake; many tables don't include row headers...
> First, the designer must manually designate the row headers â there isn't an automatic default setting for them like in Word.
> And second, there is no way for the designer to manually designate row headers.
Yes; most authoring tools are woeful in this regard.
> That means row headers must be added after the PDF is exported. It's a gruesome task to fix tables, especially given that InDesign is often used to create long data-intensive documents with multi-page tables. Imagine setting row headers by hand for a 50-page table. O M G.
Agreed!!
Duff.