Sortable columns announce "Suggestions available" in screen readers Narrator and NVDA

alandavanzo

Looking at the example under https://datatables.net/examples/basic_init/table_sorting.html
When I navigate to a sortable table header with a screen reader I get an announcement of "Suggestions available" even though there are no actual suggestions available on these headers.

Is this expected? Is this an error with screen readers? Is this something that will be corrected in a future release?

Thank you,
Alan

allan

We use aria-label to indicate that there is an action available on that column. In that example the first header has "Name: activate to sort column ascending" for example. If you press return while focused on a header cell, it will activate the sorting on that column.

I've only used screenreaders for testing - I am not a user myself, so any feedback from someone who does use them on a daily basis will be very welcome.

My understanding of the attributes is that we have used them correctly there, so perhaps the issue is in the screeenreader saying that there are suggestions rather than just reading the label? It depends a bit on what the screenreader means by "Suggestions" - perhaps it means there is a label that can be read?

Allan

alandavanzo

I believe most of the information in that aria-label is good and useful. I was hoping there was a way to modify the message to not have it say at the very end of a long announcement "Suggestions available". That makes it sound like an input field or a dropdown.

allan

You can change the aria-label text for the columns using the columns.ariaTitle option. However the string "Suggestions available" must come from NVDA as that isn't a string we use in DataTables.

Allan

alandavanzo

Looking at this further it seems that because the column can be sorted two different ways (ascending and descending) there are suggestions available on what can be done. Thank you for all your help!