Simon Willison’s Weblog

Accessible tables

4th July 2002

Mark has been educating us on the accessible way of marking up tables, with particular reference to calendar tables on blogs. My blog doesn’t have a calendar (yet, I’m considering adding one) but Mark’s articles have brought up some interesting things that I was previously unaware of. Giving your calendar a real caption explains the <caption> tag, which can provide a useful (and easily styled) caption for any table. Using real table headers explains how <th> tags are interpreted by speech browsers and shows how they can be used in conjunction with the abbr attribute to create more accessible table columns.

Mark also links to Table Manners, a superb guide to creating accessible tables.