Requesting accessibility improvements#604

I work for a university and we regularly test our plugins for accessibility.

We discovered the following issues with wpDataTables:

(1) No screenreader support for in-table search function:

The purpose of the editable cells is not announced to screen reader users.

These cells are simply announced as editable, and a user can enter text, but there is no indication that entering text filters the column, nor any status updates when the filter is applied.

If the user uses the search button at the top of the table, there is no status update that a search has been performed or results have been found.

(2) No visual indication of keyboard focus in tables:

There is no visual indication of keyboard focus as a user navigates through the tables, including the export buttons, sortable heading cells, and search fields.

The only indication that happens is a blinking cursor that appears when the user is in a search field.

(3) Low contrast placeholder text:

The placeholder text in the cells used to filter table content is too low contrast to meet WCAG standards.

(4) Purpose of page links unclear:

Navigation buttons appear below a table when the table content is split up into several pages. These links don’t have very much context, and are announced as “Previous link, 1 link, 2 link, 3 link, Next link.” There is help text between the table and the links that describes the displayed content (“Showing 1 to 50 of 137 entries,” for example), and there is a status update when a user selects another page of content (Showing 51 to 100 of 137 entries), so eventually the purpose becomes clear, but out of context the user might not realize the purpose of these navigation links.

We are requesting that these barriers be remediated in an upcoming release of the wpDataTables plugin and that you please reach out if there are questions about these notes.

I also work at a university and would like to add another, fairly simple (I hope) request to this ticket: please add support for the ‘scope’ attritbute for TH tags.

We utilize this plugin a lot for complex tables and being able to set the scope of a header to “row” or “column” or “group” would help a lot in letting human and agentic users connect data with their labels.

Basics for this pretty nicely laid out on w3.org’s tables tutorial.