The real cost of ignoring accessible tables

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Nobody bills you for neglecting accessible tables. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Header cells must be marked as headers
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Never use tables purely for layout. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

A reasonable first step

A caption tells people what they are reading. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.