- From: John M Slatin <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:16:12 -0500
- To: "david poehlman" <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>, "Bart Simons" <bart.simons@ascii.be>, "W3c-Wai-Ig@W3. Org" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Johnny Appleseed wrote: <q> I'm not sure that you mean that if an empty summary is applied that the table will be skipped by screen readers ... </q> Right, at least for JAWS: when summary="" JAWS does not speak the phrase "Table with x columns and y rows" when it encounters the table element. But JAWS *does* read the contents of the table, i.e., if the table was used to lay out a navigation bar JAWS reads all the navigation links in the order in which they appear in the table, going from left to right across each row and then down to the next row. If any cell contains another table and that table also has summary="", JAWS will read the entire table before going on to the next cell in the original table. But it will not say "table with a columns and b rows nesting level 1" which is what it would say if there was no summary attribute. Note that in recent releases of JAWS there has been a user option to turn off the announcement of tables (and blockquote, and lists, and frames, and many other tings, including punctuation). John Slatin
Received on Monday, 30 August 2004 13:16:14 UTC