New rule - a data table must have an accessible name

[Wildebrew]

Product

axe-core

Feature Description

The ARIA spec requires that a table has an accessible name.
You can see this in the documentation for the table role (in the role definition section) The characteristics table for the table role has "accessible name required: true".
You can also see this in section 5.2.8.

I have half a mind to file an issue against the ARIA spec asking if this requirement makes sense, given that the HTML <table> element does not have to have a <caption>.

But, given that this requirement is listed in at least two separate locations in the ARIA spec, it looks pretty clear that the ARIA working group has discussed this and made a decision.

If it is so I would expect Axe Core based tools to flag a violation for missing accessible name for any data table, that is

• Any <table> element that does not have role="presentation" or role="none"
• Any <table> element that passes the data table guess (it has one or more header cells.

I would personally suggest moderate severity to start with, especially if the webpage contains a single table, it could be serious if the page has 3 or more tables.

If this has been discussed here before and a decision was made not to create an Axe Core rule for this I'd be happy to tag that discussion in an issue against the ARIA spec to get further clarification.

[WilcoFiers]

Hey @Wildebrew good to hear from you again. We've had an issue open on this for quite a while: #2603 I'm going to close this as a duplicate. I'm not too sure I agree with ARIA that this actually should be a requirement. It's certainly a good idea for large table to have an accessible name, but for small tables I'm less convinced that's a strictly necessary.