Accessibility Issues in tables

Fixing an accessibility issue in a table

Fixing accessibility issues in tables involves similar steps to those for images. However, as you can see in fig. 8, the warning message and the Edit table dialogue box are slightly different.

In this case the warning, which has been selected and expanded, concerns a missing table summary, a short text describing the purpose and content of the table. As with images, when the Converter detects missing table summaries during conversion it automatically searches for captions and inserts them as table summaries when they are analysed as suitable. Where no suitable caption is found, an accessibility issue warning for a missing summary is displayed. You need to insert summaries for those tables.

To correct this, you follow the steps shown in fig. 8 as follows:

1. Click the accessibility warning “Insert alt text summarizing the purpose of the table”. The table is displayed in the Editing pane andd selected. At the same time, “TABLE” is displayed in the Selection Properties readout in the upper right-hand part of the screen, and the Path display at the foot of the Editing pane dislays the table'sposition in the HTML structure of the page.
2. Click the Insert/Edit table button. The Edit Table dialogue box is displayed. At this stage, the Summary text box is empty.
3. Type a suitable summary into the Summary text box. In this case, it’s “Survey technical requirements for EXIST space probe instruments”.

As with images, to ensure full accessibility compliance it is also recommended that you inspect the other tables during the editing session to verify that any automatically inserted alt text is suitable. You can then use the Update button to check whether any issues remain.

Fig.8: Fixing an accessibility issue in a table