Useability / Accessibility and <tables>

I define an 'Accessible Website' as a website thats accessible to all users , user-agents and devices... PDA's, mobile phones, screen readers. Blind people, visually imparied and color blind.

I've seen people rant and rave about tables-less designs, but does it automatically mean that tables cannot be made accessible?

Of course, I have my own feelings regarding this, but just thought I would kick of a discussion to get everyones own input.

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Rob - Webforumz Founder

No one has opinions on this?

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Rob - Webforumz Founder

I think tables can be accessible... I mean, they do have a purpose when you need to display tabular information!

I think it's possibly more important to use the most appropriate method to display what you want to display and the real problem with tables is that they were/are being used for graphical layouts, which they weren't originally designed for. Now that layouts can be done using another method, we should really be using that.

As for making websites accessible - There is always a trade off between aesthetics, functionality and accessibility. The most beautiful sites are generally not particularly accessible and vice versa. Google is a ridiculously functional and accessible site, but it's not beautiful...

i actually think it is... i love google (and gmail )

I only use tables for displaying tabular data or when a HUGE site is being worked on and the layout cannot be done using CSS.

Tables are not inherently inaccessible. Specialist browsers usually handle tables by 'linearizing' them - that is it reades them a cell at a time left to right, row by row, and outputs the contents in a sinlge column down the page. This is fine for tabulated data like a bus timetable, but not where a table is used for layout purposes (which is incorrect anyway)

CSS can be used to recreate ANY sensible table layout.

Like these forums for instance.

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Rob - Webforumz Founder

A table based layout can, if done smart, be almost as accessible as CSS layouts. It all depends on how brutally you misuse it Let's say you make a table with just three <tr>'s - one for the header (with a <td colspan="3">), one for the body (three <td>'s) and one for the footer (same as header). Then you are just using the table to ensure that your columns stay where they are supposed to be in all browsers (a so-called "transitional layout"), and you are free (and should do so) to use css for the rest of the design/layout.

A site structured this way will, in a linearized fashion, make as much sense as most CSS layouts. The only layout style more accessible than this I guess would be a CSS layout with the content column first in source, seeing as css layouts have the ability to place columns in the source independently of the display order.

Any thoughts on this?

Source ordered CSS is not only a must for Accessibility, but it's also damn helpful from an SEO angle.

CSS can be a crippling excercise in backwards compatability hacks, or it can be as easy as you like.... how far you take it and how much work is involved really depends on what you are doing and your chosen method of implementation.

For instance, there are many ways to do a Source ordered CSS three column layout.... some involve no hacking... some require the hacking of several elements to target specific browsers.

One thing is for sure though, tables for layout are best in the archives of the waybackmachine and the web is a better thing because of that. Hopefully more and more designers will be taking CSS and XHTML onboard real soon.

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Rob - Webforumz Founder

I agree, but for some big companies, making the move to fully CSS layouts are still a bit bold. In those cases you have to agree with me that the kind of transitional layouts I scetched out earlier are better than full blown nested tables junk?

Another thing is that this was an accessibility discussion, and I was just making the point that even when used for layout (in a decent way), tables aren't necessarily inaccessible.

In my opinion, semi table-less transitional layouts for large corps would be just as much work as a full blown CSS transition.

When you think of the fact that the majority of large corp sites have databased content being poured into tables-laden templates, it would in most cases be a simple case of swtiching the templates to table-less and making sure all HTML entities in the database content such as &, copyright symbols, etc are escaped to their equivelents (eg. & = &amp

I see no benefit, or time-saving in a transitional layout. Either do it all, or stay with what you got imo.

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Rob - Webforumz Founder

I've never done a transitional table site myself, but I understand why some people use it.