What to ask your agency about accessible tables

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on accessible tables, these questions are worth asking early.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Header cells must be marked as headers. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

A caption tells people what they are reading. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.