Accessible tables for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about accessible tables assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

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.

What to keep

Header cells must be marked as headers. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How to approach it

A caption tells people what they are reading. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.