Signs it is time to revisit accessible tables

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. A few signals that accessible tables is due some attention.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Header cells must be marked as headers
• Never use tables purely for layout

What good looks like

A caption tells people what they are reading. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

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
• 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.