Voiceover HTML table caption issue on iOS

We are currently experiencing a usability issue in our App. We also discovered this issue for sites in Safari as well.

While using Voiceover in iOS 13.3+, we've discovered that VO skips all tables that are using a caption. This occurs when a user swipes to read the contents of the page. We also observed that using the "rotor" and choosing tables, it will not recognize that there is a table on the page.

This has been repeated by multiple users on different devices. Our testing also encompassed VO on macOS Catalina and VO worked as expected for all tables we tested.

Has anyone else come across this issue?
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Posted by
ssemenchuk
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  • Observed using VoiceOver with Google Chrome using rotor on MacBook Pro Big Sur 11.3.1 Table Caption is ignored.

    —
    DannyBoyUK01
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I have the same issue and am looking for a better solution. The alternative I chose here is using aria-describedby to replace the functionality of caption.

Posted by
ZwangO3O
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I have come across a similar issue (though the one noted here seems to be somewhat resolved).

HTML captions can be navigated to and read (via swipe gestures and via the rotor "tables" setting)but VoiceOver is announcing a long arbitrary string of numbers when the text is focused upon.

Running iOS 14.8.1.

Should this be a separate ticket?

Posted by
jmegatron
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  • To add, the following implementation (similar to ZwangO3O's) can avoid this issue but our organization should not have to update well-formatted HTML with an ARIA "hack":

    <table aria-describedby="someUniqueID"> <caption role="presentation" id="someUniqueID">Table Caption Here ...

    —
    jmegatron
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Hello, I am running the latest public release of iOS, version 15.5, and am having the same issue.

This is testable on the following page: https://www.w3docs.com/learn-html/html-caption-tag.html

Using the rotor it is possible to jump to the table, however, swiping from left to right / right to left with one finger will cause VoiceOver to announce a long string of numbers that have no relevance, which is confusing from a blind perspective.

Posted by
BryanGaraventa
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I am also getting a long string of arbitrary numbers getting announced when the table caption is focused on VoiceOver.

Running iOS v15.5

Posted by
BillBrinkert
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Running iOS v15.7

We have the same issue with a long string of arbitrary numbers when VoiceOver is reading the caption.

"Row minus 92233 7 2 0 3 6 8 5 4 7 7 5 8 0 8"

Posted by
wpt
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