Re: Table accessibility (was Re: headers attribute)

On Jun 3, 2007, at 5:56 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

>
> On 2007-06-04 01:15:33 +0200 Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 3, 2007, at 6:17 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote:
>
>>>> (I tried to test this in VoiceOver, [...]
>
>>> Using voiceover as an example of a screen reader is not  
>>> necessarily  a good idea, as most vision impaired users use JAWS  
>>> or Window Eyes  on a PC and voiceover support for HTML is  
>>> rudimentary compared to  JAWS and Window Eyes.
>> I agree that VoiceOver is less advanced in its HTML support. But  
>> it  is also the only real option on Mac OS X currently,
>
> Firevox is also for Mac.

OK - hadn't heard of it before.

>
>> so worth testing  in addition to the others IMO.
>> In particular, I don't think it has any support for matching up  
>> table headers yet.
>
> Since VoiceOver only works with Safari,

VoiceOver can work with any app, but I don't think any other browser  
exports the HTML-specific accessibility interfaces yet. I think it  
actually works with any WebKit-based browser though.

>  - how much is this VoiceOver's fault, and how much is it Safari's  
> fault?

Not really a relevant question. We cooperate to get things working  
and try to support more over time.

>  - can VoiceOver make sense of things which Safari does not make  
> sense of?

Safari (WebKit actually) exports a tree of "accessibility objects" to  
VoiceOver which does the actual presentation, so some features may  
require support on both ends, but some can be implemented just in  
VoiceOver using existing interfaces. As far as I know, no one has  
tried to do the work for table header association yet. I could double- 
check though.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 4 June 2007 01:13:33 UTC