The CSS display properties are powerful. You can change the visual display of elements to match your desired styling, but sometimes doing this can have an unintended effect of nuking the semantics of the elements, as conveyed to screen reading software, in the browser accessibility tree. Screen readers and other assistive tech, in general, do not have direct access to the HTML DOM, they are provided access to a subset of information in the HTML DOM via Accessibility APIs. Sometimes what an element represents in the HTML DOM is not how it is represented in the accessibility tree.
If what is represented in the accessibility tree does not represent the developer’s intended UI, it’s either (wittingly/unwittingly) the fault of the developer or the browser. But what we can be sure of, in these cases, is that it is not the fault of the screen reader.
An example
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Curated by (Lifekludger)
Read full article at Source: Short note on what CSS display properties do to table semantics | The Paciello Group – Your Accessibility Partner (WCAG 2.0/508 audits, VPAT, usability and accessible user experience)
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