Comments on: Accessible Table Markup Demonstration

By: Chris Bloom

Chris Bloom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:03:05 +0000

Whoops, I overlooked the “write a long description” vs, “write a short description” in the source code. That seems like it should be the other way around though – the attribute should be the short value and the tagset should contain the long value, at least from a semantic standpoint.

Anyway, adjust my initial question in my previous comment to “Is the summary attribute used differently/separately from the caption tag by screen readers and co.?”

By: Chris Bloom

Chris Bloom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:57:27 +0000

Like haku, I appreciate seeing a real-world example of this. The w3c documentation on accessible tables is just too much to digest.

Is there a difference between the table summary attribute and the caption tag? Perhaps you could expand on this article by explaining WHY the scope attribute matters and how an accessibility program would use all of this.

Also, one thing I learned the other day – It doesn’t matter in what order the thead, tbody and tfoot tags appear in your HTML – the header will always appear at the top, the footer at the bottom and the table body in between. Not sure how this order is handled by screen readers, et. al. though.

By: Kevin Thompson

Kevin Thompson — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:46:44 +0000

Lookin good, but I was going to recommend you look into Geshi. There’s several plugins for Textpattern (never tried any of them though), and it generates the code formatting server side.

By: Angelo

Angelo — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:18:33 +0000

Thanks for clearing up the difference between caption and summary.

I usually get those confused, as intuitively I’d put the longer description in the element and leave the short snippet for the attribute.

anyhow, much appreciated.

By: haku

haku — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:04:46 +0000

Nice Marc. Honestly, That’s exactly the kind of thing I need to see. I wan’t to program nice semantic code like that, but without seeing it it’s all hit and miss. I will definitely follow this model in the future.