Accessible tables: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about accessible tables this quarter, make it the first item below.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Start here

Header cells must be marked as headers. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Then this

Never use tables purely for layout. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Eventually

A caption tells people what they are reading. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about accessible tables before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Header cells must be marked as headers — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.