Tagging of Tables in Accessible PDFs - is it always useful?
Hello, I have questions on what would serve the blind community best when it comes to tagging scientific documents. I am outside of the community, so if anyone can ring in on this topic, I would very much appreciate their time.
I work with scientific documents that are essentially literature reviews. All of the data in the literature is summarized and then the document explains which data is considered the best and from it, calculations are made. Each document contains a table summarizing all of the literature, relevant and irrelevant, in the document. These tables are quite complex, often spanning at least two and more and often, three to five pages, with numerous merged cells and rows.
My question is, would the blind community wish to have hundreds of cells containing numbers, category designations, etc. read to them? Would this be useful? Would one be able to follow along and assimilate the information when it spans so many rows and columns? Alternatively, would it be better to summarize this table with alternate text and let the user gather the information summarized in the table from the text of the document?
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Hi Penny, welcome to the forum 
Any chance of seeing an example of the tables?
Don't forget that screen reader users can navigate around a table - they don't just have to listen to every cell. So as long as the tables are created properly, with correct rows and columns headers, a motivated user should be fine to navigate it. A simple summary of complex data is never a bad thing, though - not just for blind users but also for those with cognitive disabilities etc, or even just for those with limited time!
James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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James,
Thank you for your response. I cannot provide a table at this time. Your response helps a great deal. This is why I wanted the input of the user community. My perspecitve prevented me from see all sides of the issue. I see that it is not an either/or issue; we need both the descriptions and the cell by cell tagging.
The merged cells in our tables are posing a challenge. There are row header cells that span more than one row and column and column header cells that span more than one row. I think this is because we are using Word to create the tagged PDF and from my beginner's knowledge, I think it is just subpar software for complex tables. We are working on that issue. I would welcome any ideas on how to make that process easier.
Thanks so much!
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