Re: Table Techniques - Summary

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lee Roberts" <leeroberts@roserockdesign.com>
To: "'John M Slatin'" <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>; "'Roberto Scano -
IWA/HWG'" <rscano@iwa-italy.org>; "'Matt May'" <mcmay@w3.org>; "'Chris
Ridpath'" <chris.ridpath@utoronto.ca>
Cc: "'WAI WCAG List'" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 6:20 PM
Subject: RE: Table Techniques - Summary


>I concur with John, we really need to prevent the accidental or
>indifference of missing summary attributes.  Although, Roberto's
>position is valid in the view that machine validators like Bobby must
>adhere to the WCAG standards, we must keep in mind the limitations or
>extra burdens we place on software manufacturers.

Agree in full with this...
For example (i hope i don't made a mistake) the "lang" attribute was
found difficoult by the screen readers that needs to change the language
engine every "stranger" word and now seems that with Jaws 5.0 has been
developed the first engine with full support of the "lang" attribute:
this is a winner position of the WCAG guidelines that have requested to
the assistive tecnologies developers to cover the "tecnology hole" of
the change of language...

>If the summary is null, then the test (machine or HIHR) could simply
>validate for no captions and no th elements.  It's simply easy to do
and
>IMHO makes perfect sense.

If summary is null or not present then test the next lines:
- if there is caption and/or there is <th> it is a data table and this
is an error that "summary" is not present
- if there isn't caption and/or <th> it *could* be a layout table or a
wrong data table and so here there is a need of an human validator.

Received on Friday, 15 August 2003 12:27:27 UTC