In an effort to provide a table with a "caption" by use of ARIA, I ran into unexpected behavior. Using aria-labelledby on a table element to point to paragraph, the table semantics were removed. No role is exposed in Safari's accessibility node inspector. VoiceOver + Safari announced the table as a group. Chrome exposes the table as a layoutTable in its inspector. I then tried aria-describedby, and the title attribute. With both of these attributes placed on the table element no role is exposed, VoiceOver doesn't announce it as a group. Reduced test case: https://codepen.io/scottohara/full/jRZLMy Testing with Firefox and IE11, the above mentioned issues do not occur. Using JAWS with Firefox and IE11, the tables all announce as expected. --- Expected Behavior If a table is provided an aria-labelledby, it should be given an accessible name (like caption does). If a table is provided an aria-describedby or title attribute, it should expose a description. In neither situation should the table be converted to a layoutTable.
<rdar://problem/50033934>
Looking at this again, if a table has column headers defined, aria-label and aria-labelledby appear to work as expected and the table is not announced as a group: https://s.codepen.io/joe-watkins/debug/MWgPEYr So seems that a table will only be exposed as a table in webkit if the table contains th elements, or a caption. If those are not present, even if the table is given an accessible name via aria-label/labelledby it will not be treated as a layout table.
(In reply to Scott from comment #2) > Looking at this again, if a table has column headers defined, aria-label and > aria-labelledby appear to work as expected and the table is not announced as > a group: https://s.codepen.io/joe-watkins/debug/MWgPEYr > > So seems that a table will only be exposed as a table in webkit if the table > contains th elements, or a caption. If those are not present, even if the > table is given an accessible name via aria-label/labelledby it will not be > treated as a layout table. I think if a table has a label, we should expose it as a data table. that sounds like the bug in this case