Jaws fails to accurately associate spanned header cells in a complex table

[Wildebrew]

Summary

There are various issues with Jaws support for complex tables. All seem to stem for Jaws not correctly treating a column header cell with scope="colgroup" and colspan attribute greater than 1.

• When a table has 2 rows of header cells and the header cells in the first row span multiple columns, Jaws announces the wrong header cells when navigating the second row (see example and description below)

This happens consistently with Jaws 2024 and 2025 across Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
This works perfectly with the same table and browsers using NVDA (and it used to work with older versions of Jas too, though I am mot able to verify it with my setup).

Example:

1. See the attached HTML table (written with proper colgroup, colspan and rowspan attributes, validated with NU Validator)
2. Open the HTML and browse it with Jaws table commands

There are 2 rows of header cells.
The first row has Account info (which spans two columns) and "Available cash" spans one column and 2 rows.
The second header row has two cells, Account number and account Name, both are regular header cells with no span (the third header cell is handled by "available cash" in the first row, it spans two rows.

When you navigate the first row you expect to hear:
"Account info, spans 2 columns", "available cash" (column 3)
But Jaws says nothing about account info spanning two columns (NVDA does)

When you navigate the second row in the header you expect to hear:
Account info, account number
Account info, "account name"
Available cash

What you do hear is
Account info, account number (columnn 1)
Available cash, account name (column 2)

(Jaws treats this as a table with two columns only and assigns "available cash" as the column header for the second column".

When you navigate in the regular rows you mostly hear what you expected, except "account info" is only announced for the first column, not the second.

You expect to hear
"Account info, account number, x", and you do
Then "account info, account name, y" but you only hear "account name, y"
Available cash is announced correctly as the column header for the third column.

This all stems from the "account info" column header not being treated as a cell that spans more than one column, even if it is marked up as such.

[aardrian]

Probably related:

• JAWS: #601 announces wrong column header info after spanned cell, 24 Jan 2022
• Chromium: #40818082 Screen readers announce spanning row header as many times as columns it spans, 24 Jan 2022

Sorry for being that guy, but I happened to be in here this morning checking up on those ongoing JAWS table bugs.

[Wildebrew]

If there's already an issue for this, that's helpful, though if it's from 2022 it has yet to be fixed. I don't necessarily think the Chromium bug is the same: I don't notice multiple announcements This table works fine in NVDA with Chrome/Edge This issue is also present in Jas + Firefox

…

On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 9:26 AM Adrian Roselli ***@***.***> wrote: Probably related: - JAWS: #601 announces wrong column header info after spanned cell <#601>, 24 Jan 2022 - Chromium: #40818082 Screen readers announce spanning row header as many times as columns it spans <https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40818082>, 24 Jan 2022 Sorry for being that guy, but I happened to be in here this morning checking up on those ongoing JAWS table bugs. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#878 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABHMYW3UDSRZNA7GBUOSRP32KPEJJAVCNFSM6AAAAABVCJJQ6WVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDKOBXGI2DOMJYGM> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

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