Re: WCAG-ISSUE-23 (DavidMacD): We should consider a new "Failure to provide role=presentation on a layout table"

This discussion is making me think we should write a technique for using
role=presentation with layout tables, rather than writing a failure for not
using it.


On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Andrew Kirkpatrick <akirkpat@adobe.com>
wrote:

> Is testing with real AT enough? The following table, which also containt
> nested tables, is completely ignored by JAWS 14 + Firefox / IE 8 and Safari
> + VoiceOver (at least). They don't announce any table, they don't find any
> table; if you try to navigate tables, they say "no tables found":
>
> Ramon,
> I tried your table (https://awkawk.github.io/layout_table.html) with JAWS
> 15/FF and got the following speech when reading line-by-line:
>
> Layout Table Example - Mozilla Firefox
> Layout Table Example
>
> heading level 1 Layout Table Example
>
> table with 2 columns and 3 rows
> heading level 1 My page
>
> table with 1 columns and 1 rows nesting level 1
> heading level 2 My article
>
> This is my article
> table end nesting level 1
>
> table with 1 columns and 1 rows nesting level 1
> heading level 2 My sidebar
>
> This is my sidebar
> table end nesting level 1
>
> © My Website 2014
>
> That said, I like the concept of requiring a way to programmatically and
> positively identify layout tables.  In the past there have been suggestions
> that layout tables should be marked with summary="" (I am in no way
> advocating for this now, just to be clear!) and even now we are talking
> about different heuristics to identify layout tables.  It seems that the
> big issue is that assistive technologies could implement the idea that Jon
> Avila suggested (essentially "no TH = layout table") and the result would
> probably be very good for not treating layout tables as tables, but I
> suspect that it would also be disliked as it would also make tables that
> are incorrectly coded today but correctly regarded as data tables less
> accessible for the screen reader users.
>
> But I also go back to the questions about what does this do to the set of
> pages with currently conformant tables and what is the real impact on
> screen reader users.  As layout tables are less ubiquitious now and with
> HTML5 requiring role=presentation on layout tables, is this actually less
> of a problem now?  Would this be a technique that is addressing an old but
> diminishing problem?
>
> I don't know the answers to all of these questions, but I'm sure that
> we'll be talking about it more...
>
> AWK
>