When accessible tables is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Accessible tables is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

Header cells must be marked as headers. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How to decide

A caption tells people what they are reading. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Never use tables purely for layout — 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.