Website Design for Writers - part 4 - Tables

I found a site today that laid out the issues in a straight forward manner. Web Teaching Articles: Practical accessibility .

First things, first: Back in the new days of the Internet, the net was made up of words. This was a time in the 80's of bulletin boards. My nephew ran one called "The Twilight Zone BBS". JayJay Net, LLC - Premier Dialup Internet Provider for people who want Top Quality service But, he and all of us have moved on. He's an Internet provider now and has kept up with the times.

Those times now bring us high-speed access and web sites with all the bells and whistles and graphics galore. It is the bells and whistles that is a problem for the disabled. Readers for the blind work well with words. They run into trouble with non-text items.

Standard browser software can accommodate many disabilities, as long as you keep your web page flexible, so that it can transform to meet the viewer's needs. This includes low-vision users being able to change the scale of letters, and color-blind and low vision users being able to change the color of text and background to increase legibility. So, your page needs to be legible and navigable under different viewing conditions.

Some simple ways to do this:

1. Have audio descriptions to accompany your text content.
2. Use images for navigation and page content.
3. Use captions with video content.

Now, for the pesky, great tables:

The Accessibility Guidelines discourage the use of layout tables, but it is really a great option for positioning elements on a page. If you carefully design the tables, then the newer screen reader software can handle them.

To understand the problem, you need to know that some of the screen reader software reads the screen, from upper left-hand corner and from left to right. They do not read the code, they read the web page as you see it. So, if you have multi-column layouts, as many Web pages do, with navigation links on the side and then content in the middle, it turns it into gibberish. Newer software looks at the underlying code instead. It will read the site, cell-by-cell.

So, the answer is to make sure your cells are "group related content." Put all your navigation links in one cell and your content in another. It is actually a logical way to do it anyway. And, one side note here is that most people expect your links to be on the left of your web page. It's good to go with the flow there.

You need to also keep your table layout "fluid." This means it scales to fill the browser window and re-sizes to accommodate content. This works also for enlarged type.

Next post, What the heck is logical markup?