Accessibility

Accessibility describes how well the web content can be accessed by different machines, different software and different people. Here is a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) by W3C. And Google has a lab here: http://labs.google.com/accessible/

The matter of tables

Here is a typical table:

Here is the HTML code of the table above:

<TABLE border="1"
          summary="This table gives some statistics about fruit
                   flies: average height and weight, and percentage
                   with red eyes (for both males and females).">
<CAPTION><EM>A test table with merged cells</EM></CAPTION>
<TR><TH rowspan="2"><TH colspan="2">Average
    <TH rowspan="2">Red<BR>eyes
<TR><TH>height<TH>weight
<TR><TH>Males<TD>1.9<TD>0.003<TD>40%
<TR><TH>Females<TD>1.7<TD>0.002<TD>43%
</TABLE>

Each table should have an associated caption that provides a short description of the table’s purpose instead of a stand-alone text title. A longer description may also be provided (via the summary attribute) for the benefit of people using speech or Braille-based user agents. Table cells may either contain "header" information (TH element) or "data" (TD element). Cells may span multiple rows and columns. The HTML 4 table model allows authors to label each cell so that non-visual user agents may more easily communicate heading information about the cell to the user. Not only do these mechanisms greatly assist users with visual disabilities, they make it possible for multi-modal wireless browsers with limited display capabilities (e.g., Web-enabled pagers and phones) to handle tables.

The output of table from Lynx(a text web browser) is as follow:

   Average Red
   eyes
   height weight
   Males 1.9 0.003 40%
   Females 1.7 0.002 43%

It just outputs the rows in turn. This is easy to render but not so pretty. It's a problem that how to present tables better in linearly text.