Tables and accessibility
Practice: add a learning table
Add a small data table to the personal page, then check its caption, headers, landmarks, heading order, and keyboard behavior.
15 minute lesson
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Add a small learning log to your page.
This is tabular data because every entry has the same two fields: a topic and a status.
<table>
<caption>HTML learning log</caption>
<thead>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Topic</th>
<th scope="col">Status</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Document structure</th>
<td>Complete</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Links</th>
<td>Complete</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Images</th>
<td>Practicing</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Change the rows to reflect what you learned.
Do not use a table to position unrelated content in columns. This table works because each row describes one topic using the same fields.
Run a basic accessibility pass
Now inspect the whole page:
- Read only the headings. Check their order.
- Confirm that the page has one
mainelement. - Check that every informative image has useful alternative text.
- Press Tab and follow the focus through every link.
- Zoom the page to 200 percent and make sure nothing important disappears.
- Inspect the table and confirm its caption and headers are exposed.
Fix one issue at a time. Reload after each change.
Done when
The table makes sense without visual styling and you can use every interactive part of the page with the keyboard.
Lesson completed