Since screen reader users often navigate pages by reading just the link text, one of the accessibility guidelines is that link text should not be the same for links that point to different pages and link text should make sense on its own (e.g., no "click here").
I am trying to apply this to a table of links. The table rows are each for a different university program. The columns are for different years of the academic calendar. In each cell is the link to the calendar for that program in that year. So, what should the link text be? The row and column context of each cell provides a complete description of the link destination.
What we have done is removed the year-specific column headers and put the years as the link text for each link. To make them distinct, the program has been added using an abbr element. Here is the live example:
https://pilots.uwaterloo.ca/sociology-and-legal-studies/current-undergra...
Any thoughts on this approach or the best way to do this?
Thanks,
Liam
Comments
Link text
I don't know of a perfect solution to this one, because of the kind of link data that you are trying to collect in a table. In this case I would suggest that the most important thing is to make sure the table has column and row headers so that a user can clearly distinguish what each link is for.
To do that, you should probably have TH tags for left-most cell of each row, since those cells are really acting as a row header ("4 Year General Legal Studies", "Honours Legal Studies", etc). WebAIM gives a great example of this use of headers here: http://webaim.org/techniques/tables/data#headers
Other folks may have better suggestions, and I'm all ears.
www.pixotech.com
A couple of thoughts: Is
A couple of thoughts:
Is this tabular data? I think it might work better as a list of headings. This portion of text says "Select your Legal Studies Academic plan based on your Academic calendar year (the year you were admitted to the Faculty of Arts):", so how about you have separate <h2>s for each year, then just a list of links for each academic calendar?
I'd check the accessibility of the PDFs. These look like they need to be printed and filled in by hand -- would this be an option for someone that needs a screenreader anyway? (I didn't check if the PDFs are accessible to screenreaders, just a thought).
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@daniel_nitsche
Thanks for your suggestions.
Thanks for your suggestions. It is reasonable to say that this is not tabular data, but a list of links. I suppose it could be a list of lists, with either years or programs first. Separate headers for each year would turn the compact table into a long web page.
We are working on the PDFs. As much as possible, I want this information converted to HTML and if not, accessible PDF.