How to get accessible tables right
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The short answer to accessible tables is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The reason this keeps coming up
Header cells must be marked as headers. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Never use tables purely for layout
- A caption tells people what they are reading
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
A caption tells people what they are reading. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Where to go from here
In practice
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
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.