Functions to Add ARIA to Tables and Lists

… Generally when I write and present things, I provide techniques, ideas, examples, and experience to address issues. When I write copy-paste-ready code, with a few older exceptions, I write generic code not tied to a framework nor library. … I have, however, written a couple vanilla JavaScript functions that you can drop into your

Short note on what CSS display properties do to table semantics

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

Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables

Consider this post to be the sequel to my 2012 post It’s OK to Use Tables. Here I will go into bit more detail based on the state of accessible efforts I see today. In that post I identified two scenarios I see frequently as a result of developers blindly following the don’t use tables

The a11y Monthly: get rid of your tables (or fix them)

While the original intended use of HTML tables was tabular data, tables are also used as aids for page layout. This was especially true some years ago when browsers hardly supported CSS. Tables were necessary to overcome limitations in visual presentation. Today, there is much more flexibility in controlling page layout using CSS. Does it