Re: Table accessibility (was Re: headers attribute)

On June 03, 2007, at, 1:53 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> What bothers me about this thread is that so far the cases to test
lack the most obvious case: A table where the table headers are
marked up as <th> with no scope='' or headers='' anywhere.

In my experience, table headers are more likely to be done as something like 
<td align><b> than <th>. Using meaningless elements instead of the "simple" 
and "obvious" ones is reportedly common. (See the "<h1> instead of <font>" 
comment in [1] and the "Web Authoring Statistics: Elements and attributes" 
[2].)

A couple of weeks ago I started collecting data tables which I'd seen 
described as complex or just technically noteworthy [3]. This is ongoing; 
there are more tables I could add [4][5][6][7].

For each example I made some variants, including the original recoded to use 
the minimum of features, another to use scope="", another to use scope="" & 
abbr="" where logical, etc. I haven't done headers=""/id="" variants but I 
can do if this would be helpful.

A few variants are deliberately non-conformant, like proposing multiple 
<thead> in tables where column headers are repeated identically every few 
rows [8]. But accidental mistakes are also likely since these are done in my 
spare time (I make websites professionally). Error reports are welcome.

I can add a "notes.html" file to each set if this will be helpful. It would 
explain the source, any non-conformant proposals, whether the souce site had 
many other tables of a similar type and so on.

[1] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/1036.html>
[2] <http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/elements.html>
[3] <http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/!dev/tables/>
[4] <http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=52530#52530>
[5] <http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=52726#52726>
[6] <http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=52779#52779>
[7] <http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=52909#52909>
[8] <http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/!dev/tables/clark2006/13-mac/scope-thead.html>

P.S. This is my first message on this list. Hello everyone! 

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 07:32:12 UTC