I've been working on making sure a table I'm adding to a web page is
accessible.  My first instinct was to hit all the markers set by the WAI
such as adding all the headers and captions and the like.  Then it occurred
to me that there was still a problem.  No matter how good I was a doing
this, the linear presentation of the material would require that the user go
through the entire table and remember the appropriate column headings while
listening to the contents of each row.  This is long, tedious and a
potential source of errors.

When a sighted person reads a table, they often don't look at every cell.
By using the row and column headers, they cut to the cell or cells that they
want.  It struck me that if the table was properly constructed according to
the WAI guidelines, it should be possible to create a script that could be
run against a web page with a table or tables that would automatically
create descriptive pages for the table that permitted more intelligent
browsing by breaking the table apart and creating a linked approach to the
table.

For example, the table I'm working with deals with Cyrillic email.  Whether
the results are readable depends on the client used to write the email and
the client used to read it.  An intelligent description would first present
the user with three links,

Read the entire table
Pick a mail reader client
Pick a mail writer client

Assuming the person chose to Pick a mail reader they would be asked,

Netscape Messenger
Outlook Express
Web Mail
Outlook Web Client

Now assuming that they selected Outlook Express they would be asked,

Pick a mail writer
Read the entire column

If they chose to pick a mail writer they would get a new list.  Picking one
of the items on the list would result in getting the result for the that
cell.  Reading the entire column would result in text something like

With Netscape Messenger, No
With Outlook Express, Yes
With Web Mail, No
With Outlook Web Client, Yes

Actually, the table is more complicated that this.  The result vary with the
settings selected in the writer and also according to which browser you use.

My question to this group is whether this would be a useful way to present
table data to somebody using a screen reader or am I just making a
complicated problem worse? As a sighted user I don't trust my instincts on
something like this.  This looks to me to be a doable script, although it
might require some rigid rules about headers, but I don't want to take the
time to work on the script if it's not a problem worth solving or if there's
an existing solution I don't know about.

------
Paul Chapin
Curricular Computing Specialist
Amherst College
413 542-2144
(The attached file is an electronic business card.  If you don't know what
that is, ignore it.)