Website Accessibility Report 9
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Guideline 5. Create Tables that Transform Gracefully.
Tables have been used in the past to control the layout of a web page. They are easily manipulated so that they show the information in a way that is easily understood. However, this is not what tables are meant for. Tables are meant to hold tabular data and keep it organized. Screen readers have trouble reading tables, and if they are used to control the layout of a page, the screen reader has an even harder time. The checkpoints in this guideline are especially helpful to those people who have a table read to them by the computer or those who only see a portion of the screen at a time. Tables should have headers for the rows or columns, and then each cell should be associated with its appropriate header. Tables should only be used for layout if the table makes sense when linearized. th's should only be used as headers, not to make the font inside it bold. Summaries and abbreviations are important for tables.
It needs to be made sure that a table is given headers for it's rows or columns by using th tags in place of td tags. Also, if there are multiple levels inside the table, each cell should be associated with its appropriate th. You can also group similar cells by using thead, tfoot, tbody col and colgroup tags. If styles are used in your web page, then tables should not be used to control the layout of the page. Tables should have a summary attribute to tell what the table is for and what is contained in it. Also, on the th element, it is nice to include an abbr attribute that is just a shortened version for screen readers.