Web Content Accessibility Guideline 5

1
Web Content Accessibility Guideline 5

• Create tables that transform gracefully.

2
Overview

• First- Tables should be used only to show
  "tabular information" (or, information that
  belongs in a table). They should never, ever, be
  used in formatting a web page!

3
Overview

• Second- Tables can be challenging for a screen
  reader (or other user-assist agent) to understand
  and present properly to the user. If we as
  web-designers don't mark up our tables properly,
  users won't get the information we want to
  present to them (making the table useless).

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Implementing

• 1) The most important things web designers need
  to do are to properly identify and associate
  headers and columns. This includes markup such as
  "th", "thead", and "col"

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Implementing

• 2) A less important thing (but still important)
  is to provide a summary tag, again for increased
  usability by user-agents. Abbreviated
  alternatives to the header tags can enable
  user-agents to move more quickly between column
  or row headers

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Example

• An example of a site that does not follow these
  guidelines is tvguide.com . This is a site that
  I would think a blind user would try- since they
  can't read the newspaper listings. Unfortunately,
  a blind (or otherwise visually impaired) person's
  screen reader wouldn't be able to tell whether
  the table was arraigned by column, row, or both.
  Sadly, this is an inconvenience to an entire
  demographic of possible users. Perhaps we can
  learn from their mistake and do better ourselves.

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End

• Thanks!