The Future of @summary in HTML 5

Written by Joshue O Connor Wednesday, 15 July 2009

There will soon be an HTML 5 working group vote on whether the summary attribute (@summary) should be reinstated in HTML 5. Joshue O Connor of NCBI CFIT is writing the first draft of the text that will be reviewed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). It is currently obsolete. Our view (and that of others with experience of accessibility in the HTML 5 WG) is that @summary should be re-instated. It is true that there are potentially better solutions for what @summary does, but currently what @summary does - it does well.

So what does the @summary do?

The following overview is from the HTML WG ESW wiki:

“HTML 5 lacks a specific explicitly associated, programmatic mechanism to provide a table with a summary. This feature is required in order to provide an overview of tabular data or a brief explanation of how to navigate a data table for Blind/Non-Visual Users who use assistive technology (AT). This is because an AT user needs to easily form a mental image of a table's contents in order to better understand its structure, or semantic relationships. The mechanism needs to be explicitly associated with the table or it becomes more difficult for AT to make that association. A summary mechanism may seem irrelevant or redundant to those with good eyesight because they have access to content relationships at a glance. However for users with visual impairments, additional semantics are often needed as a vital aid to comprehension. These useful semantics, such as those supplied by @summary, are often the difference between "seeing" or "not seeing" the table as a whole. A summary mechanism therefore provides a 'quick scan' feature for non-sighted users that requires no complex user interaction beyond giving the table element focus.”

@summary Limitations

The @summary is not perfect and in many ways it is limited, in that it is not suitable as a semantically rich long descriptor but it is useful for backwards compatibility and while its use in the wild is often very poor and the real world examples are often poorly authored, that does not take away from its usefulness or potential.

Also as many accessibility practitioners know, the wild is not an example of best practice.

Would you like to help?

If so there are a couple of things that you can do to help:

1) If you know of examples of @summary that you have found useful please send them onto us. These will ideally be complex data tables, where the structure of the table is supplied via the @summary.

2) The HTML 5 working group is open for anyone to join, so if you are interested and wish to contribute, I recommend this useful article by Roger Johansson on how to join the W3C HTML 5 working group.

For a detailed overview of the issue and the work done over the past couple of years, the W3C ESW wiki is a good place to start. Also the public HTML list is open for anyone to view. So if this is a topic of interest, get involved!

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Comments (3)

Thanks for this article, Josh, and for drafting voting text. The straw poll should help provide an indication of views and motivation among HTML working group members. Examples of table summary and new HTML working group members would be most welcome. As you are well aware the latest published HTML5 draft does not only obsolete the summary attribute, it does not provide a summary element or anything functionally equivalent. Instead HTML5 uses the caption element. The current draft text applies table summary functionality universally, and in a such way that it is not possible to distinguish the summary from the caption. Most of the debate around providing a summary mechanism has been about misunderstanding its purpose, so trying to merge its purpose with another element's purpose will be problematic leading to more confusion. The purpose of the caption element and the summary attribute have been completely different historically (caption titles the table, summary describes how the table should be read by people who cannot see how the table has been rendered). What is most worrying about not providing a table summary attribute is that no suitable functional replacement that satisfies accessibility needs exists in HTML5. If the summary attribute was to be removed and worked out of the system it should have been worked out gradually in a responsible manner and replaced with something better in collaboration with WAI.

Thanks for the comment Laura. I agree that conflating the use of @summary and the caption element is a very bad idea and will only lead to confusion amongst authors.

Disambiguation of the two in the HTML 4 spec should be continued in HTML 5, and while @summary is not perfect - and will in time need to be replaced by a better mechanism - we are not there yet.

I hope that the final decision will be a sensible one, @summary should be valid in HTML 5, in particular for backwards compatibility and then gradually phased out with a new semantically rich element that extends @summaries capabilities.

The @summary tag seems like a vital asset, and the contextual orientation features of VoiceOver on the iPhone point to the usefulness of this sort of tool. I am also interested in how the user gets the information. If the tag has been out of practice, how do audible output know where to find it?
As a trainer of the Visually Impaired with technology, I need to frame when and how I would hear this information.

Taking it a step further I would like to dream a little. Open-source collaboration is changing the world of accessibility. I would like to dream an element that could be authored by a page viewer who notices the tagging is not there. Allowing the wild to be brought up to date by concerned users. I'm thinking of a wiki esq element that could be updated when a company or author was negligent/ignorant of the need.

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