Can A Family Tree Chart Be Made Accessible?

[brentash]

Hi. I created a family tree chart of several generations of my ancestors by using a table with lots of cells and generous use of rowspan and colspan. First of all, the visitor to my site has the alternative of clicking a link shown below the chart and searching my family tree file at another site and viewing my ancestors in several different charts. Even so, I like using this chart on my page so people can see at a quick glance who my ancestors are. Now, provided the coding is done correctly, is it at all possible for a family tree chart to be coded to make sense to someone using a screen reader, since the chart branches off from each person in the chart? If so, how exactly would using CSS instead of a table make the chart make sense? Could someone please check out the chart on my site and help me create css code to make the chart appear the same but be accessible? My site is at: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~brentspg/index2.html

Brent

[redux]

i would say that, in order to make a family tree like the one you use accessible, you should provide a summary for the table and an alternate longdesc that explains the content of the table in a more easily graspable way: "bob is the grandfather, sharon is the grandmother. sharon's children are bill, bob jr., roger. bob's children are ..." if that makes sense...

[Zoef]

I think the only 'pure' way of doing this would be tho use nested lists. Maybe a combination of unordered and definition lists.

Rik

[redux]

I think the only 'pure' way of doing this would be tho use nested lists. Maybe a combination of unordered and definition lists.

Rik

... now, why didn't i think of that ?
i think a combination of what zoef said, and an additional "verbose" description might work best.

[Webnauts]

Before going deeper in this topic I would like to make the following recommendations, if you want to enhance the general accessibility of your page:

1. This document's DOCTYPE is not a recognized DOCTYPE and may not be valid. Note that DOCTYPEs are treated as being case sensitive.

2. The "lang" attribute appears to specify an invalid language code "eng". Note that whitespace is not allowed in the language code. Examples of valid language codes: "en" (English), "en-US" (U.S. version of English), "fr" (French), "i-navajo", and "x-klingon".

3. About JanaScript: links not be used because of accessibility problems that may occur when scripting is not supported or is turned off. If "javascript:" links are used, make sure that the page is usable when scripting is not available.

Pages should be usable when programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. For example, do not use "javascript:" links unless the page is still usable when scripting is turned off or not available. [P1, 6.3]

4. A link should be more descriptive than simply "Here". Using "Here" for a link description may cause accessibility problems. For example, visually impaired users often view a list of links contained on a page, and links named "click here" are not useful (imagine viewing a list of links contained on a page, and there are 10 different links named "click here", with no other descriptive information). Furthermore, this may be considered to be bad style.

5. Style sheets should be used to control layout and presentation [P2, 3.3]. The element you've used ("font") is a presentational element. Presentational elements include "font", "b", "i", "big", "small", and others. For presentation, consider using style sheets (CSS) instead. Use HTML elements only for content and structure and not for layout and presentation. Use the "em" and "strong" elements for structural emphasis.