Tips for using Tables

Here's some issues regarding the use of tables on your web pages.

Tables place text side-by-side on the screen. Text readers read the entire page from top left to bottom right, line by line. This means text readers may not work properly with tables. Instead of showing all the text in a cell, it will read the first line in all the cells in a row, then the second line, etc. (example).
The Lynx web browser ignores most table commands. The only exception is the </tr> which is treated like <br> to end each row in the table. This gets around the problem in the above point, because all the text in the first column in a row is displayed, then all the text in the second column, etc. so screen readers using Lynx can read tables fine.
Be careful with <table align="center"> because Lynx incorrectly interprets this to mean "centre all the text within the table" instead of "centre the overall table on the page". The solution for this is to surround the text in a table cell with <div align="left">...</div> to force the text within the table to be left-aligned.
Lynx runs on terminals that always uses a mono-spaced font. Text in a table can be aligned in Lynx by adding as many   characters as required to line up text in the rows. Normally the non-breaking space is not obvious in tables in graphical browsers, but can help a lot to line up table columns in Lynx. Creative use of paragraph breaks at the end of table cells, etc. can also help make tables look better in Lynx.
Be sure to check your tables using Lynx. You may realize you have to re-order the columns in the table, or add extra   or paragraph breaks to make the table look good in Lynx.
Use the "summary=" option of the "<table>" tag to produce a summary of the table. This is especially useful for non-visual users.

Please send comments about this course to Kevin.Lowey@Usask.CA