Re: Calendar markup - review please?

Ref http://iamback.com/blog/

Works pretty  well with JAWS... but:
- the default option for JAWS is to read screen text  for links and not title. So only when I realized that the << and >> links  before and after current month's calender  had title set on them, I switched to title reading and then it announced  Sept and Nov because current month was Oct. And before I thought about titles,  I just clicked on the links and discovered that they take me to previous and next month.  One alternative is to have an image link. The image can be of << and >> signs and the alt can be previous month and next month respectively. Then titles are not needed. 
- While reading down a column JAWS reads headers ok. But  only for col#2 i.e. Tuesday, it reads the dates in first column as row header. So it reads 11 as row header for 12 and 18 as row header for 19. In other columns I did not face this problem.
In all it is very good.
Sailesh Panchang
Senior Accessibility Engineer 
Deque Systems,11180  Sunrise Valley Drive, 
4th Floor, Reston VA 20191
Tel: 703-225-0380 Extension 105 
E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
Fax: 703-225-0387
* Look up <http://www.deque.com> *



>
> Dear list members,
>
> I'm working hard to try and make a site "accessible" (that is, as
> accessible as I can make it!) and would like some feedback on its current
> state.
>
> The site.
>
> The site is a travel blog - developed somewhat hastily before I embarked on
> a more than two-month trip across Asia. I concentrated on 1) creating  the
> background process to allow me to securely submit posts by email from
> Internet cafes along the road, and 2) generate the results in valid XHTML
> 1.0 strict + CSS 2.0.
> http://iamback.com/blog/
> This was largely successful (with code being valid as long as I didn't
> introduce any errors with the content of my emails); relatives of me and
> fellow travelers could read the stories with a delay of rarely more than a
> few days (depending on Internet access and some other factors). (Sorry,
> stories for a few days are still missing - I've been coding too hard...)
>
> Making it accessible.
>
> Now, I've been back for a while and have been concentrating on making the
> underlying (PHP) code better, adding new features, and generally making the
> pages mare accessible (beyond merely valid XHTML).
>
> I have a few headaches with respect to accessibility respect (not all of
> which I can address at the same time) - I think I'm mostly aware of the
> problem areas but may have missed a few. One major on I'm concentrating on
> now is the Calendar.
>
> The Calendar.
>
> Like many blogs, there is a calendar which provides navigation to pages
> with posts for specific dates. It is (obviously) structured as a data
> table, and I've done my best to make that accessible. Although I regularly
> use the 'scope' attribute to mark up table headings, this is the first case
> I encountered (in my own code) where that clearly was not sufficient;
> therefore I decided to use 'axis' in combination with 'headings'. I could
> have marked up the "day name" headings with 'scope', but reasoned that a
> combination of 'scope' and 'headings' might be confusing.
> (Interestingly, this exercise caused a sudden spark of understanding what
> 'axis' was useful for - it had always escaped me till now!)
>
> Feedback?
>
> I would appreciate if you could have a "look" (or listen) to the site, and
> let me know what I've missed or what I could improve (and how).  At the
> moment I'm mostly interested in hearing about the current Calendar markup,
> but any other comments about the site's accessibility in general are of
> course welcome, too.
>
> [For those who are interested in such things: the site is developed with
> PHP and Smarty templates, with a MySQL database that holds all the data;
> running on Apache/FreeBSD.]
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Marjolein Katsma
> Travel Blog: http://iamback.com/blog/