WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Making a grid of divs appear as a "table"

for

From: Tech
Date: Jun 17, 2008 9:30PM

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Hi folks,<br>
<br>
I'm new to the list, and fairly new to accessibility issues, so be
gentle with me :)<br>
<br>
All week, I have been trying to create a cross-browser grid with a
fixed, scrolling header.&nbsp; <br>
<br>
While I have come up with a javascript-assisted "fluid width" version
that is pretty good,<br>
it cannot have any fixed width columns--ever.&nbsp;&nbsp; I would like to try
building my own "table" that would be constructed entirely from
floating divs.<br>
<br>
But before I even bother trying, my question is,can I mark up such a
grid so that it would be reasonably interpreted as table/grid to screen
readers, etc.<br>
<br>
Does a table always have to be a table, or can anything be marked up to
appear (or semantically described) like one?<br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
</body>
</html>