Empty Table Accessibility Issue for Widget Roles

aarthur

When trying to review accessibility of pages using AInspector Sidebar plugin on Firefox, each of the sortable column headers are coming up as in violation of the 4.1 Compatible Rule. It states that elements with UI event handlers must have widget roles that accurately describe the options and actions available to the user upon interacting with the element. Is there a way using existing options in DataTables 1.10.10 to insert those ARIA widget roles for the default sorting icons? Please let me know so that I can make the appropriate adjustments as soon as possible.

allan

I went to install the plug-in you mentioned, but it says it isn't compatible with Firefox 55, which as I understand it is the current release of Firefox. What version of Firefox are you using?

DataTables added aria-sort and aria-label attributes to the column headers and the table has role="grid". As far as I am aware from my reading of the ARIA specs, that is the correct thing to do here. I've not had any issues with the screenreaders I've tested (JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver), but I'm happy to be corrected!

Allan

aarthur

I am using Firefox ESR 52.4.0 (32-bit). What version of DataTables was aria-sort added in? It seems currently if nothing is selected then the aria-sort does not exist as an attribute using DataTables 1.10.10

allan

I think it was 1.10.0 (i.e. it was part of the 1.10 development).

Here is an example using 1.10.10 which has aria-sort attributes on the header cells: http://live.datatables.net/fodecasu/1/edit .

Allan