Barney is right about screen readers and tables. The behaviour varies insofar as some screen readers (such as Fire Vox) announce the presence of all the tables, some don't announce them at all and some (such as JAWS) announce some tables and not others. I am not sure how it decides which it does and does not announce. In any case users can usually identify and ignore the markup for layout tables very easily.
A far bigger problem in my opinion is this recent fad for placing tabular data in definition lists. Where did that come from? The result really is incomprehensible because even the best screen readers can make little sense of the resulting code, no matter how semantically perfect it might be, whereas there are numerous tools for reading and navigating data tables if they are marked up correctly. I would disagree with the statement "It is all semantics, and will be seen by most designers as fundamentally incorrect and misleading". I suspect the actual figure would be nearer 0.1% of designers, although most on this list would likely agree with the statement. Steve Barney Carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob, > > As long as you have an audio-only disclaimer just before stating "The > following object does not contain tabular data". Otherwise screen > readers (supposedly) and standardist developers browsing your site in > view-source mode (as one does) will get halfway through the content of > your first <td> and suddenly come to the horrifying realisation "What's > going on?! This isn't cross-referencing data!" and will lose all sense > of context, suffer psychotic episodes, and never visit your site again. > > If you can live with that, go ahead. Just remove that beautiful-looking > W3 tick logo from the bottom of your pages. > > [/joke] > > It is all semantics, and will be seen by most designers as fundamentally > incorrect and misleading. However your page will still be valid and > accessible, and it's very hard to conceive of a realistic user persona > whose experience would suffer from this. > > There is a lot of mythology about screen-readers being utterly thrown by > tables, but at the end of the day tables operate as you'd expect, in a > linear fashion (as they are written in the code) - which is just how > your layout would be written anyway. The name in and of itself of the > tags is the only real contention here. > > So practically, you wouldn't be inconveniencing your users, but in > theory you're wrong wrong wrong. Be warned. > > > Regards, > Barney > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* > > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
