Re: TBODY

I am not sure that the reading order of a table should always be 
thead-tbody-tfoot. Maybe it seems more logical, but in many cases it can 
also reduce usability.

Most tables that have a <tfoot> include important information there such 
as footnotes or global information for the table that users must know to 
understand the main <tbody> information. In my opinion, screen readers 
should provide an option to indicate the order in which the user wants 
to read <tfoot> information.

Regards,
Ramón.

Jan wrote:


>> In practice, 99% of the times that I come across <tbody> etc. it is just cluttering
>> up the HTML code to no purpose whatsoever.
> 
> Agree. 
> Over the years many people claimed THEAD, TFOOT and TBODY should be used properly, so screenreaders can deal with the data. The only thing that sort of went wrong was that when using those elements correctly, the footer is placed between header and bodies. The reading sequence was then obviously incorrect. 
> 
> Because the elements are for printers and not for screenreaders, I tried to get people to use them only for long tables and even then the sequence (head, footer, bodies) was not satisfactory. It seems that JAWS has fixed this issue since version 11. Tables marked up with THEAD, TFOOT and TBODY can be read in correct order in JAWS when using table navigation key strokes.

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 20:04:45 UTC