Before you invest in accessible tables

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Before you spend anything on accessible tables, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Header cells must be marked as headers
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Never use tables purely for layout. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A caption tells people what they are reading. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about accessible tables before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A caption tells people what they are reading — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.