[thelist] PHP & Accessibility

[Diane Soini]

Tables and accessibility aren't mutually exclusive. For one thing, you 
must use them to display tabular data. There are lots of things you can 
do to make your tables more accessible, such as ways to use certain 
attributes to link up the column or row headers with the data. As for 
tables used for layout, it isn't really a crime. I've seen a demo of a 
screen reader that reads the summary attribute of a table, and if it 
says "table for layout" or something like that, it isn't totally 
horrible. After all, screen readers have been reading html pages longer 
than the css for tableless layout has been around (and in my opinion, 
tableless layout is still not ready for prime time). Just try to see 
how you can reduce the complexity of your layout so you don't have to 
have a lot of layout tables. A good thing to do is use the validators 
to validate for accessibility and look up section 508 accessibility 
standard for more info. All we can do so far is aspire.

On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 09:23 PM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:

> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 02:25:02 +0100
> From: "Andre Genic" <g3nic at lycos.co.uk>
> To: "Thelist at Lists. Evolt. Org" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
> Subject: [thelist] PHP & Accessibility
> Message-ID: <NPEPKIEPFHDOHBJNNGEOEELPCBAA.g3nic at lycos.co.uk>
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> Message: 21
>
> 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.