Hi There,

I understood that for a page to be totaly accessible, It should be rendered WITHOUT tables and use CSS STyle sheets

I have in the past week though come across coders that argue this is not the case and that a page can be accessible even though defined with in tables.

Could someone please explain this condition of table use and what it means in the over all picture in regard to accessibliity and comliance.

cheers

Steve

I've never seen anything about tables not being accessible - there are some browsers that don't render tables though.

Have a look at http://webxact.watchfire.com/ - it does a pretty good job at pointing out areas for improvement, and also try http://www.wave.webaim.org/index.jsp

There's lots of info at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ as well

You can certainly make a table accessible. I think the main thing is it needs a summary attribiute added to describe the table. You might be able to build a css layout that is easier for someone to use, but a table based site can definitely be made accessible.

blue-dreamer gave you some good links and I'll add another http://www.contentquality.com/ You can validate your pages for accessibilty concerns and from what it says about your page is usually enough to know what needs to be done or at least what you need to find out more about.

A few times through the validator and you'll naturally be making your sites accessible.

blue-dreamer is right. It's not that tables aren't accessible in and of themselves. It's that they were designed for the purposes of organizing content that is tabular in nature, such as sports standings. Due to the lack of anything else to do the job better, tables were used for layouts as well for the longest time.

Now, with the advent of CSS and XHTML, designers don't have to do that anymore. The div tag, with the correct CSS, can create a tableless, cross-browser compatible, accessible layout that is much leaner and easier to debug.

You can still use tables for things, and there are times and places where they have a legitimate purpose (shopping cart order details, the sports standings as I said earlier.) My rule of thumb is that anything that is presented in rows and columns is tabular: everything else should use a div.

Basically, if you start with a tableless layout, make sure it validates, build your shell out and go from there, you'll be fine for the most part. You'll hit the odd "WHY THE *@#$@*#$@$#@# DOESN'T THIS @#$*@()$@*#()$@ WORK?" but they'll get fewer and farther between as you go.

The problem is that most of the standards-types don't explain any of this very well, and that's what leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

Thanks very much indeed for your input.
Much appreciated and understood.