Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone

Accessibility Issues for Layout Tables

Layout tables may create accessibility problems, especially for people using older browsers and/or older assistive technologies. For example, Web designers often use tables to lay out text in side-by-side columns. Older screen readers handled these columns poorly, reading horizontally across the table one line at a time instead of reading the contents of one cell followed by the contents of the next cell. The results were usually unintelligible or hilarious—or both. This problem has been largely resolved now, and contemporary screen readers usually “linearize” the text appropriately. That is, they read the contents of the cell at row 1, column 1 before moving on to row 1, column 2, and so on.

But linearization ...