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Possible MediaWiki table formatting causing problems for screen readers

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From: Angus March
Date: Feb 12, 2025 3:39PM

Hi I'm an editor for a fan wiki and it's recently come to my attention that
the MediaWiki tables I've been designing might be giving screen readers a
hard time so I'd like to improve the accessibility of the wiki,
specifically the way we format tables. I'm not blind myself, so I'm relying
on the expertise of the community to help me understand the real-world
impact of my formatting choices. I've been experimenting with NVDA and it
doesn't seem to perform all that differently among the tables using
Firefox, but that might just be down to my inexperience. So, more
reductively:

- How easy/difficult is it to navigate the tables?
- Does the information make sense when read aloud?
- Are there any aspects of the table formatting that create
accessibility problems?


As of now, the dominant style we're using is having this invisible
supertable nest several tables within. This is so the horizontal space is
used efficiently. This is one such table.
<https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Naughty_Nomaan%27s#Goods> There are a
wide variety of formatting traits including text alignment, images and font
changes.

So contrast that design with this one
<https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/User:The_Ultra-Mind/Sandbox#Boring_old_vanilla_tables>.
It makes minimal use of formatting, doesn't nest the tables, the only class
it uses is "wikitable" and a great deal of screen space is wasted on the
right. It also doesn't have alt text on the images. Is this design any
easier than the first one for a screen reader?

As a bonus, one idea I abandoned before I had the nested table idea was to join
multiple tables into one
<https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Warrick#The_Guild_House>. This one was
ugly, but I'd be curious if anyone could put a finer point on it.