Table accessibility (was Re: headers attribute)

On Jun 2, 2007, at 2:18 AM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

>
> Yeah, would be wonderful to have actual data available.
>
> I've had a few opportunities to test with two blind Jaws users. For  
> them,
> headers and scope didn't help one bit. Probably because Jaws  
> appears to take
> IE's output as input, so that's useless by definition. But I've  
> heard claims
> that newer versions of Jaws consume the actual HTML. If so, there's  
> hope yet.
>
> Note though that, at least for these users, configuring Jaws was an  
> immense
> challenge. So they may well have unknowingly had it configured to  
> ignore
> useful things. With my own eyes I've only seen Jaws 4 (quite old). Its
> configuration area is pathetic. You actually need to be sighted to  
> make sense
> of it :( (This may be better in current versions of Jaws, I don't  
> know.
> Upgrading tends to be extremely expensive, because it will often  
> mean also
> needing a newer Windows versin, PC, speech synth and braille reader.)

Finally, an actual test result! I also checked what VoiceOver (the  
Mac OS X built-in screen reader) does, and it doesn't support either  
scope or headers. I started this wiki page to record test results.  
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/TableAccessibility>. So far we have  
identified no screen readers with actual support for the headers  
attribute, though I'm sure there are many more we could test.

I'm not sure what other screen readers or particular versions are  
important to test. I really wish some accessibility experts would  
chime in here! What are the most widely used existing screen readers?  
Which, if any, do people on this list have testing access to?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Saturday, 2 June 2007 20:49:02 UTC