Re: operational concept for table browsing

Having considered the various ideas which have been set forth during the
past few weeks, it seems clear that little advance has been made upon the
current HTML 4.0 draft. As I think all participants agree, AXIS and AXES
should remain the basis of table accessibility. Al has indicated that it
may be necessary to offer a mechanism for encoding the semantic
relationships among data cells, which extends beyond the capabilities of
the AXES attribute as currently defined. However, neither Al nor any other
WG participant has yet produced a convincing example of how such coding
would improve the audio rendering of a table, and thus the case for it has
not been convincingly made out.

It has also been suggested that CLASS values be reserved by which the
author can indicate to a user agent whether a table is to be read, by
default, across the rows or down the columns.

I have also suggested that there is a need to define CSS properties that
could control the reading order of a table. The details of this proposal
can be decided upon later, since at present it is the HTML 4.0
specification with which we are primarily concerned.

Received on Thursday, 9 October 1997 19:48:31 UTC