Tables

Help & Questions Rebus Press Support
1

@Apurva
Hi Apurva, Regarding tables, I wanted to check on the status of accessibility with Pressbooks tables, keep on the to do list: labeling tables/figures/images, and figure out how to best move table/figure/image captioning from below the table/figure/image to above (for accessibility best practice) without affecting formatting.

Thanks,
Dave

2

@dave.dillon Hi Dave, thanks for your question!

I believe it’s good practice to label and number figures and tables in a book, perhaps by adding these details in the caption field and placing above the figure or table. Perhaps @jmitchell, @jgray, or @michelle.reed could verify whether this is accurate (and if this is required of images too?).

Adding captions to images and tables is fairly simple with Pressbooks and should not affect formatting.

Currently, captions on tables are displayed above the table in export formats (print and ebook) and above in the webbook. I’ve added in the following custom CSS (web) in your books to ensure that captions for tables on the web display above the tables and are centred:

#content table caption {
 caption-side: top; 
 text-align: center; }

To further ensure the accessibility of tables, I’d suggest looking at this chapter in the BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit: https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/chapter/tables/. Following the steps outlined here (or in the Pressbooks user guide) to apply table captions and header rows & columns should not drastically affect formatting.

Once I hear from Jess, Josie, or Michelle about best practices for captions of figures and images, I can take a look at the existing behaviour on your texts and see whether it needs modifying.

Please let me know if this helps, or if you have any more questions!

3

@dave-dillon I’m reviewing the notes left by our accessibility reviewer on the Blueprint texts, and they have noted that tables should be numbered (as 1.1, 1.2, etc.) and that their preference with captions is to place them above images and tables. Their suggestions around table headers echo what is covered in the Accessibility Toolkit (chapter 6: Tables), so moving forward, we can follow the steps they have outlined!

Hope this helps. :slight_smile: