I'm trying to better understand what the PROC REPORT CAPTION option does. If I'm reading the documentation correctly, it says when used with the ACCESSIBLETABLE system option, it makes table captions both visible and accessible. When used with the NOACCESSIBLE system option, table captions are not displayed but the text is still accessible.
When I use the ACCESSIBLETABLE system option, I see the caption text in P tags just above the TABLE tags. Shouldn't these be CAPTION tags immediately below the TABLE tags? Do the CAPTION and ACCESSIBLETABLE options do more than add P tags for the caption text?
Thanks
Yes, in my opinion, having a double announcement when reading the document linearly (once for the visible caption and once for the table summary) outweighs trying to make a single announcement. This makes the document far more usable for people reading it with screen reading software since there is not a way to make a single announcement and keep the feature of tables being automatically announced with their "summary" attribute.
In an ideal world, screen reading software would automatically announce the PDF <caption> tag when they encounter a table, but since they don't do that I recommend using the summary attribute for this information.
If you want to add a little more semantic structure to the document for the visible caption, if it is appropriate, you could make them heading levels. That way the screen reader user would hear something like "heading level 4, table foo" then "table foo" when they encounter the table. This step is not required, and might not even be appropriate in all cases, but is simply a suggestion.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind with tables, captions, and PDF.
Putting all of this together, if you want a "caption" placed below the table, you can set CONTENTS to be what should be announced when a screen reader lands on the table, and then make a plain <p> below the table to be your visual caption.
The usefulness of the CAPTION feature is more apparent in the HTML5 destination. In the HTML5 destination:
Because of this behavior, an existing SAS application can now have table <caption> elements become visible by adding ACCESSIBLETABLE without having to explicitly define a CAPTION. In HTML5 the position of the <caption> can be controlled with CSS and other techniques. This also keeps the CAPTION and SUMMARY independent of each other in case you need to use them for different purposes.
Thanks for explaining the differences between captions and summaries in HTML5 and PDF.
I'm working on a report that can include from 2 to more than 100 tables each representing a single group. The number of rows per group/table can vary from a few to hundreds. All tables share the same simple structure. Each table requires a visible label/title with the name of the group. I would like a screen reader to announce the group name when in table navigation mode. Since the visible label/title will be the same as the summary, depending on how the report is navigated, there is a chance that the same text might be announced twice. Will the advantages of table summaries outweigh potential disadvantages of redundant text?
Thanks
Yes, in my opinion, having a double announcement when reading the document linearly (once for the visible caption and once for the table summary) outweighs trying to make a single announcement. This makes the document far more usable for people reading it with screen reading software since there is not a way to make a single announcement and keep the feature of tables being automatically announced with their "summary" attribute.
In an ideal world, screen reading software would automatically announce the PDF <caption> tag when they encounter a table, but since they don't do that I recommend using the summary attribute for this information.
If you want to add a little more semantic structure to the document for the visible caption, if it is appropriate, you could make them heading levels. That way the screen reader user would hear something like "heading level 4, table foo" then "table foo" when they encounter the table. This step is not required, and might not even be appropriate in all cases, but is simply a suggestion.
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