Question About Tables and How to make them more Accessible

[Carlos Montalvo]

Hi All,

Another question I've had is about tables. I used to generate many tables with rows that are in different colors to highlight different information. For example, a truth table could be green for True and red for False. I noticed in 

https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/topic-tabular.html

The option for @color is set to 'p' which apparently means potential so someone has thought about it but I guess it hasn't been implemented. Obviously for accessibility, colors don't really matter.

So what's the current protocol for making a table more accessible instead of using colors? Is it typical for people to use a combination of <em> <alert> <b> and <hline>?

-C.

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Carlos,

I'm not sure if coloring rows of a table is readability or accessibility.

We try, and I think we might be able to do better, to make tables that screen
readers can understand and navigate. That is accessibility. But I'm no
authority, which is why we have this list.

That said, there has been no work on colors. It gets complicated. We have the
potential for many color schemes for HTML, and dark mode for each. What is to
stop a color from beiong washed out or not providing good contrast? Maybe
table_color_1, table_color_2, etc, and color themes need to set them? Or maybe
just alternating colors, like green/white fan-folded computer printout paper?
(Showing my age.) Grayscale for PDF meant to be printed? Perhaps alternating,
3-cycle, 4-cycle as options would be consistent with our approach?

I'll resist taking on an attitude, since you are new around here. If <b> means
bold, we don't have that. And never will. We are all about semantic markup. ;-)

Rob

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[Carlos Montalvo]

The specific color doesn't actually bother me other than just having a way to emphasize a particular row. Something like

<row style="emphasize"> or <row style="highlight">

and then have PreTeXt figure out the color based on the theme with some defaults. Green/white fan-fold is great (oddly enough I used to code in Fortran77 and my dad showed me his punch cards), gray-scale is also fine so long as there are some defaults we can all agree on.

My apologies. I meant <term>, my brain went back to my pre-2000s HTML coding days with <b> (showing my age).

This isn't a critical issue so if no work has been done on colors that's fine but again if there's a way I can help I'm happy to get involved. 

-C.