Accessibility and Tables

You can make tables more accessible by performing certain tasks. Also, support for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) tags helps make tables more accessible.

Accessibility Tasks

You can improve the accessibility of tables by including the following to each one:

• Header row
• Captions
• Summary

See Inserting Tables and Editing Table Properties.

ARIA Tags

For HTML5 output, Flare Desktop adds ARIA attributes to new tables automatically. This helps make tables more accessible in HTML5 output by letting users know where the cursor is located in the table. See Accessibility and ARIA Tags.

Depending on how you structure the table or table stylesheet, the following attributes will be included in the code:

• scope="col"

  • This displays when the content in a <th> tag is within a <thead> tag.

    

  • It tells the user that the content covers the scope of the current column.

    

• scope="row"

  • This displays when the row content is within a header column. You can create this scenario by changing the <td> tag in a row to a <th> tag.

    

  • It tells the user that the content covers the scope of the current row.

    

• role="rowheader"

  • This displays when the content is in a column header, as specified by the Column Type (Header) in a table stylesheet.

    

  • It tells the user that the content covers the scope of the current row (when it is in a <td> tag rather than a <th> tag).