Why does pagination use SPAN rather than A tags?

adamterlson

I'm curious: why does pagination use SPAN tags rather than A tags? They are links, so wouldn't using an A tag be more appropriate?

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I'm sure there was a calculated reason, merely wondering what it might be! I ask as I'm concerned about 508 compliance.

allan

You are absolutely correct - this is wrong in DataTables! This will be fixed in DataTables 2.x when that happens. The reason I am reluctant to fix it in the 1.x series of releases is for reasons of backwards compatibility with styles which have already been applied to deployed installs of DataTables.

What I would suggest for now is to use a pagination plug-in which basically does exactly the same thing as the built-in pagination (the built-in one is really just a plug-in itself, so it's easy to pull out!), and change the SPAN tags for A tags.

Ultimately what I would really like to do is have DataTables use ARIA to be as accessible as possible. If you know any ARIA consultants I would be very interested to know as I've not had a huge amount of luck thus far in that particular hunt.

Regards,
Allan

adamterlson

Thank you for your reply, Allan! I unfortunately don't know of anyone in the Aria space off-hand, but if you need any help in your accessibility endeavour (or any other for that matter!), please let me know. You can contact me over at http://www.terlsonokeefe.com.