JAWS reads aria-label multiple times for a table with role="img", in MS Edge on Win10 - wai-aria

Question

I have a table element that contains an HTML bar chart, and I want screen readers to read a text description of it, so I'm using this approach:
<table role="img" aria-label="table description">
In Voiceover on Mac, it reads the label and skips over the rest of the content in the table. However in JAWS with MS Edge on Windows 10 it reads "graphic table description" for each td in the table, and in nested tables too. Here's a simplified example:
<table role="img" aria-label="table description">
<tr>
<td>
row 1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
row 2
</td>
</tr>
</table>
This problem doesn't happen with IE 11 on the same Windows computer; it reads "graphic table description" just once.
I also tried adding aria-hidden="true", tabindex="-1", and role="presentation" to the td and tr elements in the table, but none of those helped.
Am I doing this wrong? Is there a better way to achieve this? I'm wondering if this is a bug in JAWS...

Answer 1

Continuing from the comment section to the answer section because this might be a solution (and is too long to put in the comment).
The actual <table> has several nested tables in it
Ah, that could be part of the problem. If you use <table role="presentation">, the "presentation" status only conveys to table child elements (<thead>, <tbody>, <tfoot>, <tr>, <th>, <td>) but stops if it hits a nested table. The nested table would also need role="presentation".
If you apply that same logic to using role="img", the nested table would not be seen as an image and would, in fact, cause invalid html because an <img> cannot have any child DOM elements. role="img" on the outer table would make the entire table an image, so the nested <thead>, <tbody>, <tfoot>, <tr>, <th>, <td> elements would all be ignored, but once a nested <table> is seen, then you'd have problems.
I'm not sure if the following would be valid:
<table role="img" aria-label="chart description">
<!-- other table stuff -->
<!-- nested table -->
<table role="presentation">
</table>
</table>
The outer table would be an image and the inner table should be ignored, but you'd still have an element (inner table) inside an image. You'd have to run it through an html parser checker.
In addition to role="presentation" on the inner table, you could also add aria-hidden="true" to hide the table from screen readers, otherwise a screen reader user could navigate all the text elements (if any) inside the "presentation" table.