RE: aria-rowindex and aria-colindex

Bryan, if it is made into a layout table with role presentation, then 
there are no columns and rows. 

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com



From:   Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>
To:     Alexander Surkov <surkov.alexander@gmail.com>, 
Cc:     Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com>, Dominic Mazzoni 
<dmazzoni@google.com>, W3C WAI Protocols & Formats <public-pfwg@w3.org>
Date:   01/29/2015 04:46 PM
Subject:        RE: aria-rowindex and aria-colindex



Using an example I’ve seen recently, what happens when you have a table 
grid structure constructed entirely of Divs that includes nested tables 
that are taken out of the accessibility tree using role=presentation, and 
individual rows may not actually have the same number of gridcells 
contained within each row?
 
How would the AT/browser calculate which columns are associated with which 
cells?
 
From: Alexander Surkov [mailto:surkov.alexander@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 1:08 PM
To: Bryan Garaventa
Cc: Joanmarie Diggs; Dominic Mazzoni; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: aria-rowindex and aria-colindex
 
As I understand it that was original idea but it looks people agreed that 
it should not be used to override native ordering. The use case was to 
skip number of rows and columns in the grid/table; there's no consensus 
yet on markup how to achieve it.
Thanks.
Alex.
 
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Bryan Garaventa <
bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:
I think I’m misunderstanding the purpose of aria-colindex.
 
I thought it was to specify X Y coordinates like row3 cell7, but it looks 
like from this thread that aria-colindex is meant not to do this at all, 
but to simply specify the number of total columns in a row, is that 
correct?
 
If yes, this doesn’t match the functionality of aria-rowindex, which 
actually is a Y coordinate.
 
 
From: Alexander Surkov [mailto:surkov.alexander@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 9:51 AM
To: Joanmarie Diggs
Cc: Dominic Mazzoni; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: aria-rowindex and aria-colindex
 
 
 
On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 4:55 PM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs@igalia.com> 
wrote:
On 01/28/2015 04:11 PM, Alexander Surkov wrote:
> But why? having aria-colindex on cell makes my example possible. It
> doesn't look any better than on row.

From a conceptual and property naming point of view, I think it does
look better on the cell. 

In my mind, a "column index" describes the column number in which a
given cell is located. In other words, a "column index" is one half of a
cell's coordinates. 
 
I think here's a problem since your description means that cell can be 
moved all around the table through columns. In particular the web author 
can do
<table>
  <tr>
    <td aria-colindex="2">2nd col</td>
    <td aria-colindex="1">1st col</td>
  </tr>
</table>


Also that means it overrides the native semantics that Dominic was against 
of. I'd say that the column index is a property of *set* of cells and not 
a property of an individual cell, thus you cannot override column position 
on the cell itself and thus the cell is not right place for aria-colindex 
attribute.

 
What you're describing seems more like the "first
visible column" which, as I believe you suggest in a different response,
is a property of the table.

Naming issues aside, let's say we put this property on the row or table
rather than on the cell.

right, just attribute on the table to specify amount of skipped 
rows/columns should be good for spreadsheat use case.
 
What then happens if we have a case where there
is a gap. Like in a spreadsheet in which certain columns are hidden?
What would the value of your property contain?
 
I wasn't aware of this use case. If cells are hidden then should be they 
taken into account when counting? Also I'm curious if doesn't mean that 
native semantics is overridden by that. Otherwise than that the 
aria-colindex attribute approach can work here but you have to be very 
cautious defining this attribute. For example, it would worked out if 
aria-colindex was allowed on cells of the first row only, aria-rowindex 
was allowed on rows only.
But if we don't want to support this use case then I think I prefer 
properties right on the table element, plain and easy.
 
 

--joanie