Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Accessibility tip 15: Provide table summaries

The last task in making the calendar accessible is providing a summary of the table for screen readers and speech browsers. Mark Pilgrim suggests “Monthly calendar with links to each day’s posts” as appropriate summary text and that’s what I added.

However, a check of the calendar links revealed a problem: the link associated with each day did not point to the posts for that day but to an individual post made on that day. In other words, the link for Friday 5 July was:

http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000575.html

instead of the expected:

http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2002/07/5.html

This was because I have my Preferred Archive Type set to Individual (so that by default my permalinks to point to individual entries). I needed to modify the MT link code from:

<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>"><$MTCalendarDay$></a>

to:

<a href="<$MTEntryLink archive_type="Daily"$>">
<$MTCalendarDay$></a>

So now the table summary not only exists, it’s accurate too.

And while I was making these changes to the Main Index template, I updated my blogroll entry to point to Euan Semple’s new MT-based weblog. It’s at www.theobviousblog.net/blog/. The stopwatch is on, Euan. Let’s see how long it will take you to customize your templates and style sheets.

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