Thursday, November 11, 2010

"Drupal Tables Filter Module" without the "summary table" tag- not barrier free, not w3c compliant, SEO deficient

The Drupal table module patch was developed for the Drupal Service Arlmedia project -  international web presence for an orthopedic hospital in Freiburg, Germany.  The international web presence of orthopedic Gelenk-Klinik Freiburg is implermented on Drupal 6.x .

We used the Drupal table module to develop a price list for orthopedic procedures .

We like the Drupal table module a lot: tables could be either directly edited in html, but that would in the long term be error-prone and not very intuitive.
For better handling, we opt for the table filter module http://drupal.org/project/tables.  A handy little module that supports tables definition intuitively.
 The Drupal Table Module however does not display the html table summary tag.
 A summary of the table that is used by screen readers by  blind persons to read a summary of the HTML table. Also, the summary will be used by search engines (SEO). Without summary tag a html table is not w3c validated.
To resolve these problems Arlmedia Drupal Service has developed a patch that implements the summary tag in the Drupal table module.  The revised source code of the Drupal table module is on http://drupal.org/node/968612 to download and free use under the GPL.

  How do I add the summary tag ?

  The Summary Table can now be written to the head of the table:

  [Table = js-table summary = "your_summary" first column | etc | etc

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