37th Annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference Has Concluded

Accessible PDF/HTML Tables: Here’s What You Need to Know

Date & Time

Tuesday, March 15, 2022 - 1:20 PM PST

Location

Platinum 4 (CRAWFORD TECHNOLOGIES)

Description

The use of tables has become increasingly prevalent in the last few years. This session will highlight the issues that document accessibility specialists face when making tabular content both compliant and useable. Tagging simple or uniform tables is pretty straightforward. Challenges arise when dealing with complex tables containing merged columns, nested tables, or even paragraphs and lists. Although complex tables can be remediated to comply with accessibility standards and guidelines, they require more complex tagging and testing to be truly useable by your blind and partially sighted customers. To understand the challenges presented by complex tables, it is helpful to consider the assistive technology enabling end-users to access a properly tagged PDF file. When screen reader users are navigating a table, they only see one cell at a time. Because of this, table and row headers must be correctly associated with the table data. We will use a wide range of samples to show participants how to make complex tables accessible. We’ll cover topics such as association, scope, spanned content, and how to address tables with multiple headers. There are times when content is arranged in table format for layout purposes only, and in such cases, it may be more appropriate to tag this content as a series of paragraphs. As we present the best approaches to making complex tables accessible, we will also highlight the factors to consider before the tagging process begins.

Audience

Healthcare & Rehabilitation
Finance & Banking
Media & Publishing
Marketing
Insurance

Audience Level

Intermediate

Session Summary (Abstract)

The use of tables has become increasingly prevalent. This session will focus on the issues that document accessibility specialists face when making tabular content accessible. Tagging simple tables is pretty straightforward. Challenges arise when dealing with tables containing merged columns, nested tables, or even paragraphs and lists.

Session Type

General Track

Topics