Tabular Data: Making Tables Comprehensible

Tables are intended for relational tabular data, never for page layout.

When a screen reader traverses a well-structured data table, it continuously announces the column and row headers corresponding to the current cell:

<table>
  <caption>Employee Quarterly Sales Performance (2026)</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Employee</th>
      <th scope="col">Region</th>
      <th scope="col">Revenue</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th scope="row">Elena Rostova</th>
      <td>Northern Europe</td>
      <td>$142,000</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Key Elements:

• <caption>: The title of the table announced upon entry.
• <th scope="col"> and <th scope="row">: Explicitly ties data cells to their parent headers.