A practical checklist for accessible tables
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time accessible tables comes up.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The checklist
- Header cells must be marked as headers
- Never use tables purely for layout
- A caption tells people what they are reading
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
Why this earns attention
Header cells must be marked as headers. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
In practice
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about accessible tables before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Never use tables purely for layout — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.