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Design Issues and Accessible
Adobe PDF
The challenge of creating a fully accessible document is made even greater when
working with complex layouts, or ambiguous layouts such as tables. The way
computers display certain kinds of graphics, fonts, and layers of text and graphics
can also create problems that can effect accessibility.
Working with tables
Tables pose a special challenge for screen readers and other assistive technologies,
as by their nature, they present textual or numerical data in layout that can be
easily referenced by sighted persons without having to read all of the information
contained in the table.
Problems with tables can be minimized by always defining a table with rules
around the table and between columns, rows, and cells. "White space" tables,
where data is organized in a table format without rules, can create unexpected
results, as it is difficult for the Make Accessible plug-in to readily recognize such
layouts as tables.
It is also helpful to use table formats in the authoring application, such as table
column heading, row heading, table cell data, etc.
Basically, a table should have the following hierarchy of elements:
, a
<Table>
container element with attributes specifying placement and bounding box infor-
mation; Table Row elements
for each row of table cells as immediate
<TR>
children of the container element; a Table Data element
or Table Heading
<TD>
element
is the immediate child of each Table Row element, which contains
<TH>
the actual data or heading content of the associated table cell.
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