Re: Heading and labels

On Mon, 26 Sep 2022 16:17:33 +0200, Andrew Kirkpatrick  
<akirkpat@adobe.com> wrote:

> I don’t believe that it was the intent to have table headers covered  
> under 2.4.6.

I believe, and hope, that it was the intent. As I suggest below, the  
element seems to fit very well within the meaning, and as others have  
noted "WCAG was designed to be technology-agnostic" is a fundamental claim  
made for WCAG. I believe claims that a specific HTML element was  
intentionally but implicitly excluded from an apparently relevant  
requirement are generally  unsustainable.

> WCAG refers to “headings” when referring to h1-h6 section titles, and  
> “headers” when referring to table header cells. I think >that often  
> table headers should be descriptive, but not always. If you have a table  
> that is expressing data collected the table >header may have text that  
> is pretty obscure (e.g., “Data_usrnm_curr”) but is reflective of the  
> data collection and/or storage >system.

Which I think is an obvious failure to present the data accessibly, in the  
same way that "dat-gr-27435-lin-log.png" is almost certainly a failure if  
it is presented as the textual alternative for a data visualisation image.

> If you want to make the argument that table headers are labels, I don’t  
> believe that they meet the definition for a label >because they are not  
> used to identify a component, they are associated with content within  
> just part of a table. (Label: text or >other component with a text  
> alternative that is presented to a user to identify a component within  
> Web content)

A "column of a table" or "row of a table" seems to fit the ordinary  
meaning of "component within web content" pretty well.

The th element in HTML provides a heading for such a component of content.  
The original definition from 1997 makes that pretty clear:

    "Table cells may contain two types of information: header information  
and data.
    This distinction enables user agents to render header and data cells  
distinctly,
    even in the absence of style sheets. For example, visual user agents  
may present
    header cell text with a bold font. Speech synthesizers may render header
    information with a distinct voice inflection.

    The TH element defines a cell that contains header information. User  
agents have
    two pieces of header information available: the contents of the TH  
element and
    the value of the abbr attribute. User agents must render either the  
contents of
    the cell or the value of the abbr attribute. For visual media, the  
latter may be
    appropriate when there is insufficient space to render the full  
contents of the
    cell. For non-visual media abbr may be used as an abbreviation for  
table headers
    when these are rendered along with the contents of the cells to which  
they apply."

    -https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.6

Today's current version of HTML says much the same:

    "The th element represents a header cell in a table."
    ...
    "The th element may have an abbr content attribute specified. Its value  
must be
    an alternative label for the header cell, to be used when referencing  
the cell
    in other contexts (e.g. when describing the header cells that apply to  
a data cell).
    It is typically an abbreviated form of the full header cell, but can  
also be an
    expansion, or merely a different phrasing."

    - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/tables.html#the-th-element  
viewed today.

cheers

Chaals

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Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2022 11:09:47 UTC