On 15 Jan 2006, at 4:11 AM, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
From an accessibility/assistive technology point of view it's worth
noting, though, that many screen readers have different modes for
tables and forms, and the user needs to switch between them. I seem to
remember that it's not guaranteed that the th (which may possibly need
the explicit scope="row") will be read out to the user when in forms
mode (which they'd be in when filling out the form), so that all
they'd know about the radio buttons is that one is "black", the other
"white", but without any context. This can, to a certain extent
(though dependent on user settings) be remedied by adding a title to
the inputs as well...
To pick up on the accessibility angle of this discussion, and I'll come
down firmly on one side of the fence ;-) In this situation the table is
clearly a layout table which, as Patrick points out earlier and in
accordance with WACG 1.0 [1], *should not* include any strucutral
markup such as th, scope etc.
My thinking is this: A form is a device to enable user to interact with
the site owner. A table is the representation of data recorded at
discrete intervals (or some other discrete dimension).
On forms in tables Joe Clark has this to say:
"Don’t put forms in tables unless you absolutely have no choice
whatsoever. Suddenly the screen-reader user must deal with simultaneous
forms mode *and* tables mode. Placing a label for a field (like “Name”)
in a cell adjacent to that field is unnecessary and leads to a great
deal of confusion." [2] He goes on to address theh differences between
paper and online forms. A good read.
Other readings:
Accessibility 101 at University Wisconsin [3]
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/online-course/standards/
forms.htm See under heading: Tables and forms
[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-table-layout
WACG 5.4.
[2]: http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000791.html Joe Clark on Forms
and Tables.
[3]:
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/online-course/standards/
forms.htm See under heading: Tables and forms.
kind regards
Terrence Wood.
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
