Re:When to use tables for layout
by dmoney on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @07:40PM
(#220326)
Perhaps the solution is to make a better screen reader, one that can extract semantic data from non-semantic markup.
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Yeah, screen readers seem pretty useless if they cant handle a web page with tables-for-layout, since these are quite common whether we like it or not.
A sensible heuristic would be to treat tables without TH or THEAD elements as layout-tables, ie. just read them serially, while treating tables which contain at least one TH-element as a true semantic table. I'll bet this is the correct interpretation 9/10 times.