[thelist] PHP & Accessibility

Andy Budd andy at message.uk.com
Thu Aug 21 04:14:43 CDT 2003


Don't get too hung up with tables. Ideally we'd all be using CSS to 
style our pages but until browsers catch up it's reasonable to create 
hybrid pages using a combination of simple tables and CSS.

The problem with tables in relation to accessibility is twofold. 
Firstly tables must make sense when linearized. So don't put a bunch of 
headings in one row and their content in another (unless it's tabular 
data). When the page is read in a linear way the titles will be 
disassociated with the text they are relating to so the page wont make 
sense. Also don't use things like <thead> and <colgroup> to get round 
this problem as these are purely used to make tabular data more 
accessible. To be honest most screen readers handle simple tables 
pretty well.

However most screen readers choke on complex and especially nested 
table layouts. So if you're going to use tables, keep them simple, try 
not to nest and make sure they make sense when linearized.

Oh, and don't worry about PHP. It has nothing to do with accessibility. 
It just spits out HTML. As long as you make it  spit out accessible 
HTML you'll be OK.



Andre Genic wrote:

> I'm looking into accessibility, but I'm just wondering how well it can 
> merge
> with PHP.
>
> Why do I ask, well I'm still a very naive with accessibility, but from 
> what
> I've read so far it looks like tables (my main source of web building) 
> are a
> no no? I'm sure you can tell me more on this.
>
> Thing is that I want to make sites that are viewable by all, but if 
> tables
> are out? what options are open for rendering dynamically displaying
> information (from MySQL), and I mainly use tables for that, I'd hate to
> think that I've invested a lot of time learning PHP and I'd hate to 
> think it
> was all for nothing.
>
> I'd really appreciate any pointers in the right direction, so I can 
> learn
> more, get my facts straight and get things right etc.
>
> Apologies if this sounds really dumb.
>
> Andre.



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