- From: Sailesh Panchang <sailesh.panchang@deque.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 08:57:07 -0400
- To: <www-html@w3.org>, <sec508@trace.wisc.edu>
- Cc: "'Laura Carlson'" <lcarlson@d.umn.edu>
Here is just one example of headers-id being used in the manner intended. There are several pages on the GE website that present financial information that use this technique. See http://www.ge.com/en/company/news/press/1q03earnings.htm When the labels or headers to be related to a data cell are not exactly above it or to its left, or the table uses rowspan / colspan, one needs to use the header-id method. Sure this is time consuming and error prone and can be worthless if coded wrongly or in a manner not intended. But there are automated tools (like Deque Ramp and Deque Worldspace) that can check for accessibility violations and even fix them in an automated fashion - including header-id attributes once the developer identifies the header cells. Even the TH tag can be misused - say if it is used for data cells. Or, developers may fail to ensure the uniqueness of the id value on a page. Then is that a good enough reason to knock the TH tag or the ID attribute off the HTML specs? Would it not be better instead to advocate the use of existing accessibility features and educate developers about accessibility? Thanks, Sailesh Panchang Senior Accessibility Engineer Deque Systems Inc. (www.deque.com) 11130 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite #140, Reston VA 20191 Phone: 703-225-0380 (ext 105) E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:55:19 UTC