Adding a row to a table

[dbradbury]

Once again, the simplest of tasks wastes time. I have a 2-column table in the homepage of a Canvas course. I want to add a row below, but this produces an additional row with the leftmost cell divided into two rows. I cannot access the bottom of these two rows. I cannot merge them. Any ideas? Or would it be quicker just to recreate the whole table from scratch?

[JadynTHONE]

Could you go into the HTML code and have a look at what is happening? You could potentially delete extra accidental rows that way if you are unable to access the bottom two rows in the content editor.

[dbradbury · Accepted solution]

Hi Jadyn,

Thanks for the response. I looked at the HTML, then worked out it was quicker just to copy the 'normal' rows and add them to the end.

[JeffCampbell]

When you are working on a table, clicking on any spot should produce a submenu that looks like this:

Section 4 has options to add a row above, below, or delete a row. This should generate an entirely new row regardless of which cell you are in. I am not sure why you are getting the leftmost cell split into two rows. Are you able to record your screen showing this occurring? I'm curious about finding the cause as that should not happen using this context submenu.

[dbradbury]

Hi. I know about inserting rows in tables. This is what happened to me... Wasted a lot of time - not unusual when trying to format things in Canvas pages

[JeffCampbell]

Can you go to the HTML editor and share the code, either the code for the table on here or send me a DM with the code for the whole page? I know you responded to Jadyn by saying you found it easier to copy and paste the normal rows, but I wanting to see if we can figure out what is causing so you don't have to use alternative means to generate the tables.

I recall seeing something like this once several years ago myself but do not remember what the cause was on my end. Is this happening any time you try to use tables, or only on this particular table?

BTW, I saw your comment to Chris about being a bit time constrained at the moment. If you want, send me a DM when ready. I'd be happy to help you figure out a solution that eliminates the tables that you can implement in a future iteration. Sounds as if that fundamentals course could use a bit of an update too.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @dbradbury ...

Apologies for breaking into your conversation with @JeffCampbell here, but I'm curious about your use of tables based on the screenshot you shared with your "Week 1", "Week 2", "Week 3", etc. buttons.  You may or may not be aware of this, but generally speaking, tables should really only be used to hold data...and not so much for course layout and navigation.  While I completely understand why people do like to use tables for layout like you've shown, doing so can make the page inaccessible for people who use screen readers.  I did a little searching here in the Community because I know others have written about this, but there are a couple people I've seen who have written blogs here with alternative solutions to tables that can accomplish something very similar to what you are already doing.  Here are a couple links I found for you (NOTE: there may be other similar topics here in the Community that you can search for):

• Home Sweet Homepages without Tables
• Columns Without Tables: code-snippet

These two pages might give you some ideas about how you could, potentially, make some tweaks to your existing page to make things a bit more accessible for you and your students.

Also, I do not know if your school has the Cidi Labs DesignPLUS product integrated with Canvas or not (this is a paid product), but one of the things DesignPLUS allows you to do is to design pages that have accessible navigation menu systems.  There are many examples in their "Showcase" site here: cidilabs – showcase that you can look through to get ideas of what other grade schools and places of higher education are doing in their own Canvas environments.

I hope this information will be of some help to you.  Sing out if you have any questions...thanks!

[dbradbury]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your thoughts. You are correct that using images for weeks is not accessible to students using screen readers. For the classes this particular course is aimed at, there are no students with visual disabilities, but when we do have such students, we modify the homepage by adding additional text so JAWS or NVDA screenreaders can detect it - and we test it first.

Secondly, we use tables because that was the method suggested to us in our "Canvas Fundamentals" training from Instructure, as the following image shows. I will take a look at the links you sent, but this is our busy period, and we already spend so much time wrestling with formatting Canvas pages, that we will go with the table for the time being and make changes after the current rush.

David