ODF AccSC Agenda Item 4 - disjoint headers and IA2

[Pete Brunet <brunet@us.ibm.com>]

Here's my input for agenda item 4.

----- Forwarded by Pete
Brunet/Austin/IBM on 08/23/2007 09:07 AM -----

Pete Brunet/Austin/IBM

08/10/2007 09:15 AM

To	Peter.Korn@Sun.COM
cc	Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS, Hironobu Takagi/Japan/IBM@IBMJP
Subject	ODF AccSC Action Item - disjoint headers and IA2

Peter, IAccessible2 in its current form
is unable to provide access to multiple disjoint row & column headers
(Hiro's slides #8 & #13).



IA2's methods: 
HRESULT        
columnHeader ([out] IAccessibleTable **accessibleTable,[out, retval]
long *startingRowIndex)
HRESULT        
rowHeader ([out] IAccessibleTable **accessibleTable,[out, retval]
long *startingColumnIndex)

However, from a practical perspective,
Notes 8 doesn't have this function and I don't think OpenOffice does either.

IA2 is like UAAPI which returns a table
while AT-SPI differs from those two by taking in a col/row index and returning
an accessible.  None of the three API sets allows for the return of
disjoint headers.  

The problem could probably be dealt
with by using tables within tables, e.g. a 5x5 in the lower right quadrant
of a 10x10, but Notes 8 and OpenOffice can't create these so we'd need
to experiment with hand generated markup.  If such a table could be
created, then if the AT's focal point was on a cell in the nested table
it could ask for the header of the inner table and then ask for the header
of the outer table.  There are all sorts of complications like: how
does the AT know that it's in a nested table and there is math needed to
access the correct column of the header in the outer table, and such research
would be too time consuming for me to work on at least over the next few
months.

Pete Brunet
                    
                     
                     
         
IBM Accessibility Architecture and Development
11501 Burnet Road, MS 9022E004, Austin, TX 78758
Voice: (512) 838-4594, TL 678-4594, Fax: (512) 838-9666
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Multiple Levels of Table Headers v3.odp