An accessible sortable table is not necessarily the same as a usable sortable table. Outline: Basics Let The User Know This Thing Has Sorted Screen Reader Announcement Sort Arrows Column Background Column Background via <col> Let The User Know This Thing Sorts SVGs Layout Windows High Contrast Mode Screen Readers…
I have written a bunch about responsive tables. Maybe too much. I keep trying to give developers the information they need to make informed decisions — ARIA attributes, screen reader & browser pairing results, bugs, and so on. I have spread things out over years of posts. I have filed…
Visually and functionally sortable column headers on tables are straightforward (I have a post on that coming soon). However, making them accessible can be a bit frustrating. To clarify, making them accessible to screen readers is frustrating. I wrote the post I promised in the opening: Sortable Table Columns There…
Whether you call them cards, block links, or some other thing, the construct of making an area of content clickable (tappable, Enter-key-able, voice-activatable, etc.) is not new. While hit area size is mostly a usability issue, marketers often want a larger click area around their calls to action (CTAs) to…
Related Under-Engineered Responsive Tables A Responsive Accessible Table Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables Keyboard and Overflow
I regularly work on projects with HTML tables that have been pushed to the edge with styles, scripts, and widget features. A common pattern is where rows are hidden until the user opts to show them. Unfortunately, the pattern is often over-complicated with unnecessary script and styles that regularly break…
Many of my clients over the years have relied on fields in tables. Sometimes a checkbox to select a row, sometimes text inputs to update information, sometimes buttons select something. Rarely are they interested in a block of label text above the field, and I cannot disagree with them. The…
Related Other posts in this accidental series: Layout as a Clue to Semantics Display: Contents Is Not a CSS Reset Tables, JSON, CSS, ARIA, RWD, TLAs… Tables, CSS Display Properties, and ARIA A Responsive Accessible Table Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables When I presented my talk CSS Display…
Related Other posts in this accidental series: Display: Contents Is Not a CSS Reset Tables, JSON, CSS, ARIA, RWD, TLAs… Tables, CSS Display Properties, and ARIA A Responsive Accessible Table Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables I did not mean to write a series on tables. It’s not a…
CSS resets are a collection of CSS styles that undo the default browser styling of many or most HTML elements. Recently I have seen cases of developers using display: contents on lists and headings to remove the margins and padding, and generally to visually do what a CSS reset might…
Yeah. Another one. Let’s recap: In 2012 I asked that we get back to using HTML tables for tabular data in my post It’s OK to Use Tables, In November I argued that we need to avoid ARIA grid patterns for tables in Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables,…
Update: 7 October 2023 Tables with display properties are now functional across Chromium, Gecko, and (finally) WebKit browsers. Barring regressions (which have happened), display: contents is the only style that may cause issues, and that is a function of a poor specification. My post It’s Mid-2022 and Browsers (Mostly Safari)…