Techniques for WCAG 2.0

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F90: Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.1 for incorrectly associating table headers and content via the headers and id attributes

Important Information about Techniques

See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.

Applicability

HTML and XHTML.

This failure relates to:

Description

One way for authors to explicitly associate header cells to data cells is by using the id and headers attributes. These allow the author to associate multiple header cells to a particular data cell, which can be necessary when complex data tables with more than one level of heading are used.

The failure occurs when the relationship between data cells and corresponding header cells cannot be programmatically determined correctly because the association of id and headers attributes is faulty. This can happen, for example, when copying code within tables and forgetting to update the code.

Examples

Note: The example below is based on the complex data table presented as example 1 of H43: Using id and headers attributes to associate data cells with header cells in data tables (HTML) .

Failure Example 1: Table content not correctly associated to nested headers

In this example, nested headers are used, but the content cells are incorrectly associated via the id and headers attributes. All cells reference top level header 'Exams' (id="e") - this isn't correct for the last three columns which should reference header 'Projects'. Also, the referencing of the second level column headers has been accidentally swapped even though in this example this makes no difference as the contents (1, 2, Final) are repeated.

Example Code:


<table>
   <tr>
     <th rowspan="2" id="h">Homework</th>
     <th colspan="3" id="e">Exams</th>
     <th colspan="3" id="p">Projects</th>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <th id="e1" headers="e">1</th>
     <th id="e2" headers="e">2</th>
     <th id="ef" headers="e">Final</th>
     <th id="p1" headers="p">1</th>
     <th id="p2" headers="p">2</th>
     <th id="pf" headers="p">Final</th>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <td headers="h">15%</td>       
     <td headers="e p1">15%</td>  // should be "e e1"
     <td headers="e p2">15%</td>  // should be "e e2"
     <td headers="e pf">20%</td>  // should be "e ef"
     <td headers="e e1">10%</td>  // should be "p p1"
     <td headers="e e2">10%</td>  // should be "p p2"
     <td headers="e ef">15%</td>  // should be "p pf"
   </tr>
</table>

Failure example of table incorrectly associating headers attributes in table content (td) to table headers (th).

Tests

Procedure

  1. For tables that associate data cells to header cells via the id and headers attributes, check that the programmatic association is correct.

Expected Results

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