Web Content Accesibility Guidelines
W3C Standard 6, Guideline 5 - Create tables that transform gracefully
Tables are an awesome way to display data. They work really well when trying to show people information using tabular information. However, because tables are so easy to manipulate and make into user friendly views, it has become an easy way out to use tables to format a webpage. This is no good practice. Tables are to be used for displaying information only. There are very rare instances where a table works well in other forms.
When alternative readers, braille displays and speech readers, try to access a page and view tables, there are certain guidelines to follow that make life so much easier. First, developers need to remember to effectively use row and column headers. Using the "< th >" tag to identify a header cell is important for screen readers to be able to identify them. Another important item is to not use tables for webpage layout. It really messes with the alternative readers. Tables are able to be used on rare occasions for layouts, but it is important to remember not to use header tags or other label tags to format random data cells. There are other means to do that. Another good thing for developers to remember is to provide a quick summary about what the table is showing. That way the readers can let the impaired user understand what the table is about.
In looking for sites that use tables effectively, I found this site that would normally otherwise work well with tables. www.rsc.org I found that they are actually using tables to format the look of a page that really should not need tables for the layout, but only for the periodic table they are displaying. So in one case, they use the table in an incorrect way and they also use a table in a correct way (to display the periodic table). www.shopping.com is an ok example of an effective use of tables in the layout.
