Below are my suggestions for update to the tables portions of
the UA guidelines.
Regards/Harvey Bingham
hbingham@acm.org
(781)862-6908
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WAI Accessibility Guidelines:
User Agent
W3C Working Draft WD-WAI-USERAGENT-19980703
4.6 Alternative Representations of Tables
1.[PRIORITY 2]
Give access to table summary information. User
agents must give users access to the value of the
"summary" attribute of the TABLE
element. New: The value should give the purpose and
structural information about the table.
2.[PRIORITY 2]
Allow the user to create and control serialized
views of tables.
Tabular information can confuse users with
certain dependent user agents
New: that are unaware of cell content display
requiring more than one line.
User agents should be able to
serialize the table -- render it one cell at a
time -- to reduce confusion.
Users should be able to specify whether they
want the cells rendered row by row, or column by column.
New: The rendering order must respect the
writing direction for the table, left-to-right, or right-to-left.
Users may choose different mechanisms for
rendering cell header information (e.g., render row and
New: /or
column header information before each cell,
render row header information once at the beginning of the
row,
New: ask for cell identification,
etc.) The HTML 4.0 specification (see [HTML40],
chapter 11 and
in particular section 11.4.3) and
the CSS 2 specification (see [CSS2], chapters
12, 17, and 19) describe mechanisms for structuring
tables, identifying headers, and rendering them
in accessible ways.
See also the section on table navigation for
related information.
Note. Table serialization is important for
tables used to structure tabular information as well as those used
to lay out blocks of information.
6.6 Table Navigation
1.[PRIORITY 2]
Allow the user to use the keyboard to move the
selection between cells in a table (notably
left/right within a row and up/down within a
column).
NEW: Allow the user to determine the
structure of tables (how many rows and columns, in each of its sections)
and any nesting of tables in cells of other
tables.
A table navigation mechanism should also
provide the user with information about the current table cell
(see the guidelines on alternative
representations of tables).