[docbook-apps] Accessibility re: Tables XSL stylesheets and Docbook

["Billard, Trish" <trish dot billard at hp dot com>]

Hi there,

I'm back, and still trying to determine how I can output accessible HTML with the sourceforge docbook stylesheets.

I've done a bunch of research, and the XSL stylesheets include a lot of support for things that, if done in XML properly, result in accessible output.  Yay!  Thanks Norm et. al.!

But I've run across a Priority 1 requirement that doesn't seem to be supported:  W3C checkpoints 5.1 and 5.2, which correspond to Section 508 1194.22 g & h.  The requirements state that row and column headers shall be identified for data tables and that markup shall be used to associate data cells and header cells for data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers.
The HTML implementation guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#tables suggest using:
*	TH id attribute to identify each header, and TD headers attribute to associate the TD with the TH
*	TH scope attribute (for example, <TH scope="col">) 
*	Both the id and the axis attributes for TH, and then the headers attribute in each TD

Yikes, this looks complicated.  And I don't see such attributes implemented in the table.xsl stylesheet.  Could you even get the info you need to do this from the docbook markup?  It looks like the easiest thing to do, if I were attempting to customize the table stylesheet, would be to add the scope="col" attribute when putting out a TH.  This looks like it would work for most simple tables, but I'm afraid I'll get in trouble if we have entries that span columns.

Has anyone tackled this one?

Thanks!

--Trish

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