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kable(): accessibility scope attributes in HTML tables (#1747) - #2500
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Column headers in HTML tables now carry scope="col" so screen readers can associate data cells with their column headers. This is emitted unconditionally and does not change how tables render. Row-name cells can optionally be marked up as row headers (<th scope="row"> instead of <td>) by setting options(knitr.table.html.row.header = TRUE). This is off by default because <th> cells may be styled differently from <td> (e.g., bold) and could affect existing CSS. The empty corner cell above the row names is not a header for either dimension, so it receives no scope. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This was referenced Sep 19, 2026
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Closes #1747
Adds accessibility markup to the HTML tables generated by
kable(), per the WAI tables tutorial.scope="col"on column headers — emitted unconditionally. It lets screen readers associate each data cell with its column header, and does not change how the table renders.<th scope="row">on row-name cells — opt-in viaoptions(knitr.table.html.row.header = TRUE). When on, the first column (the row names) is marked up as row headers instead of<td>. Kept off by default because<th>may be styled differently from<td>(e.g., bold) and could affect existing CSS, so this does not silently change anyone's current output.The empty corner cell above the row names is a header for neither dimension, so it gets no
scope.Snapshot tests in
test-table.mdcover both the default (scope="col"only) and the opt-in (<th scope="row">) output.🤖 Generated with Claude Code