348903 - Table summaries exposed in two places

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[parente]

Table captions are exposed both as 1) the name of the table accessible and 2) as the static text of a label accessible that is the first child of the table. An AT must deal with this special case by filtering out one or the other. It would be better if Firefox just exposed the table caption in one and only one place as the accessible name or description of the table.

Comment 1

[parente]

I take my recommendation back. Tags are allowed in table summaries. To properly expose any stylistic information, the atkText interface is needed. This means either the label is the correct (but ugly) solution with no accessible name on the table, or the table accessible grows the atkText interface.

I can deal with any solution. It's just confusing to the AT to have to filter repeated content.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

I believe that the accessible table interface provides a getter for the caption.

Shouldn't we use that, and mark it with ROLE_CAPTION, then use the label relationships and remove the accessible name from the table?

Comment 3

[Evan Yan]

table caption also makes it hard to calculate table cells' rowIndex and colIndex.
see bug 360184

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

The bug title talks about table summary, but the description talks about caption. A summary is an HTML attribute on a <table>, and a <caption> is child content.

In any case, we've changed how we expose caption - it shows up as a description and we use the describedby relation to point to it.

I think because we are showing the described by relation now this works as it should.

If there is an issue with table captions or summaries, please open a new bug.