I need to assign alternative text to a table in LibreOffice Writer, but I can’t find an option to do that.
I know how to do it with figures, but is there a similar functionality for tables?
Any help would be much appreciated.
I’m not sure I understood what you said.
When you want to replace text in a table cell, you select the existing text in the cell and paste the new text as “Unformatted Text”.
Paste Unformatted Text
A frame can take a description, does this count as alternative text? If so, put the table in a frame.
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It seems to be about “Ease Of Access”. A piece of software (in Win implemented since V7 at least, imo) can produce a “human” voice reading a description of an object if assigned as “Alternative Text”. for visually impaired persons. The tool needs to be correctly activated, of course, and I don’t know the details.
Probably. But images (figures?) come in frames so if a table is in a frame then the same method of adding alternative text can be applied to it. Headings in Frames are out of normal order in frames so there could be issues with text, possibly. But I am not experienced in this.
Figures implies captions, Tables can be captioned without a frame just by right-clicking in the table and selecting from the context menu
As in many cases there is a problem with the UI: Where entities presented to the user as “objects” need to support services of different kinds, it isn’t made clear by what “internal objects” these services are supplied, and how these objects organize their relations. The UI mixes them up in its dialogs, and (in a different way) even the API does so. (Example: You can’t get the .Text of a spreadsheet cell as a separate object.)
In the case under discussion, an image shows an UI-property Alternative Text and an UI property Description while a TextFrame only shows Description. I don’t know how this is related to services in the background. For me it’s a mess.
You’re absolutely right
Many thanks to you all for your responses. I will give a little bit more background in case it helps anyone. I am a lecturer and I have a visually impaired student in my class, and so they need to read the libre-office documents I provide using a screen reader. For images I can add ‘Alt-Text’ to describe the figure, so that when the screen reader encounters a figure it will describe it verbally for the student. I have included tables in my documents and it would be really helpful to do a similar thing with tables so it doesn’t read it as just a jumble of words. From your responses it seems that putting the table in a Frame and then adding alt-text/description to the frame might work, so I’ll give that a go. I’m not sure how the screen reader will read out the table contents, but at least if it reads out the description first they’ll know a table is coming and what it contains. Thanks again for the help!
Yes. That’s the background I supposed.
Sorry. I don’t know how to test on my system if the Description of a frame will be accessed by the reader tool.
There is some more information from this page, Accessibility/Accessibility-dev - The Document Foundation Wiki , but not specifically related to tables.
Orca has a link to LibreOffice bugs/enhancements related to screen reading, meta bug tdf#36549 . I don’t see tables listed so I don’t know how they are dealt with