Comma on Sortable Table Example

[amire80]

Hi!

On the Sortable Table Example page, there's this example:

    <caption>
      Students currently enrolled in WAI-ARIA 101
      <span class="sr-only">
        , column headers with buttons are sortable.
      </span>
    </caption>

I understand that the idea here is that the first part is shown visually to everyone, and the second part is only "shown" to accessibility software. However, if you ignore the markup, it's comma splice in terms of English grammar and style, which is already a bit of a problem. And when you need to make this text localizable, it becomes even more of a problem.

The reason I'm bringing up localization is that this example was actually used almost verbatim by frontend designers and developers in a translatable string in the project in which I provide support to the localizers. Translating this is a bit hard because this looks like one sentence, but its two parts don't sound so related. It would be nice to split it into two translatable strings, but splitting a translatable string in the middle of a sentence is not a great practice.

Would it be possible to split it without a comma? For example:

    <caption>
      Students currently enrolled in WAI-ARIA 101
      <span class="sr-only">
        (column headers with buttons are sortable)
      </span>
    </caption>

This looks more like two parts that can be separated cleanly: if you ignore the markup, it becomes "Students currently enrolled in WAI-ARIA 101 (column headers with buttons are sortable)", which is a good English sentence without comma splice, and it can also be split into two translatable strings without hurting understanding or structure.

I suggested this to our frontend developers, but they were reluctant about it because they wanted to follow W3C's example. Usually, following W3C's example is great, but perhaps this particular example could be changed? :)

Thanks!

[css-meeting-bot]

The ARIA Authoring Practices (APG) Task Force just discussed Sortable table change request.

The full IRC log of that discussion

<jugglinmike> Topic: Sortable table change request
<jugglinmike> github: https://github.com//issues/3066
<jugglinmike> Matt_King: This is just a change to punctuation. I think the reporter has good rationale, and as a screen reader user, I agree with the change
<jugglinmike> Matt_King: In the sortable table, there is a caption for the table that's visual, followed by a comma, and then an off-screen phrase that says "column headers with buttons are sortable"
<jugglinmike> Matt_King: The reporter is just saying to take the comma out and put parenthesis around the final part since that would work better for translation and would make more grammatical sense
<jugglinmike> arigilmore: That makes sense to me. I can write a patch for this
<jugglinmike> Matt_King: Thank you! I'll assign this issue to you, then

[amire80]

Thank you for the fix! Is this going to be updated in https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/table/examples/sortable-table/ ?

[amire80]

Oh, I see it's deployed now. Thank you!