| Tip 16 | Improving Table Accessibility |
For years, HTML tables have been a great source of pain when it comes to accessibility. It’s easy for sighted people to glance at a table and get the context. It can be much more difficult for people using screen readers to understand the big picture. To make matters worse, before CSS let us lay out our content, developers used tables to define the various regions of the page. This created huge problems for screen-reading software because it had to navigate around the tables and figure out how to read them. Unfortunately, even today, some websites rely on tables for layouts, prompting the HTML5 specification to create a special ARIA role for a layout table:
* | <table role="presentation"> |
| | ... |
| | </table> ... |
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