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Lengthy Tables, Lists, and Screen Readers

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Jul 13, 2018 8:03AM

I am working on a 150 page document that is mostly a series of long tables, one per state. The 50 tables have row headers but no column headers. Some tables can be fit onto a single page, most cannot. Occasionally a data cell spans a page boundary. This leads to awful problems with screen readers, as my testing shows. Restructuring the tables, essentially breaking them into pieces so that no table spans a page boundary is a lot of work! And it doesn't solve the problem of lengthy data cells that just cannot naturally fit into a page boundary, even with fancy editing.

SO: I'm thinking of getting rid of the table semantics altogether and replacing it with a linearized structure of a List, like so:
<List>
<LI>
<Lbl>text from the table header cell in row 1
<LBody>text from the table data cell in row 1, possibly including nested list structures
<LI>
<Lbl>text from the table header cell in row 2
<LBody>text from the table data cell in row 2, possibly including nested list structures
<LI>
<Lbl>text from the table header cell in row 3
<LBody>text from the table data cell in row 3, possibly including nested list structures
etc.

I think this will be much better for screen reader users, actually. I don't think the table semantics really adds anything given that there are only row headers.

Feedback most welcome!

A