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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