Edit comment LC-2878 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-2878: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Wilco Fiers <w.fiers@accessibility.nl> on behalf of Accessibility Foundation; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Comment:
This test only requires for a table to have tr, td and th elements. But what it should do is require data cells to be associated with their corresponding header cells using td and th elements. Requiring every table to have a th is incorrect in my opinion, since tables can exist that do not have headers. This is not always obvious to people, but itâ€™s quite simple to create a table without headers. Simply take a table and remove the rows and columns with headings in it leaves you with a perfectly valid and accessible (though probably not very useable) table that only has data cells.

This comment is part of the project for the Accessibility Support Database

Proposed Change:
* Check for the presence of tabular information.
* For each occurrence of tabular information:
** Check that data cells are marked up with td elements
** Check that header cells are marked up with th elements
** Check that data cells are associated with their corresponding header cell(s) according to the rules described in the HTML specification.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: We may want to add to response that we have open action items (on Bruce and David) to create more examples.; Proposed Resolution: At this time we are leaving H51 as-is. We don’t agree that the test procedure needs modification because, for simple tabular data, it is not necessary to explicitly associate data cells to header cells, and a main point of the one current example is to illustrate this. For this example, it would be confusing to add your last step to “Check that data cells are associated with their corresponding header cell(s) according to the rules described in the HTML specification.” While simply removing the rows and columns with headings could result in HTML that passes an automated validation test, we disagree that such a data table conforms to the specification or could be characterized as accessible.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)