634126 - Text not accessible via IAccessibleText for text children of CSS tables

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1052866

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Attachment: Test case.

Gecko exposes nodes styled as a table (using CSS "display: table") as tables to accessibility APIs. Also, Gecko does not expose the IAccessibleText interface on tables. This makes text inaccessible (except via text leaf nodes) when there are text children of a CSS table.

Str:
1. Open the attached test case.
2. Try to retrieve the text of the table accessible.
Actual: No text interface is exposed, so no text can be retrieved.
Expected: There are three possibilities:
1. The text interface should be exposed and the text content ("table cell") should be exposed;
2. The text content should be exposed on another node beneath the table, perhaps with a role of text frame; or
3. The node shouldn't be exposed as a table to accessibility APIs at all.

This could probably be considered an authoring error: it doesn't make sense to use "display: table" without using "display: table-cell" on children. However, we've now seen two separate cases of this in the wild. The result is that NVDA doesn't render the text children at all.
See these related NVDA tickets:
http://www.nvda-project.org/ticket/1373
http://www.nvda-project.org/ticket/1338

This occurs in both Firefox 3.6 and 4pre.

Comment 1

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

taking into account http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html#anonymous-boxes we should follow 2nd I think and therefore it should be a dupe of bug 576838 (marking a11yfx5 blocking to make sure they are fixed both).

Comment 2

[Joanmarie Diggs]

Ping? It turns out that this bug appears here: http://openelec.tv/forum/90-miscellaneous/73147-openelec-for-amlogic-s805-quad-core-stb?start=105

In that instance, the author does use "display: table-cell" for the forum post author. But the content of the post lacks that, but it is contained in an element with "display: table". As a result, there is a table which has either no children, or children just for the links. The text itself is not accessible.

Comment 3

[Raphaël POITEVIN]

Hello,

With Orca I can see that string. So has this bug an important user impact?

Regards