The utility of tables for screen reader users

The mere existence of digital documents on the web makes those documents more accessible to blind people than if they were not digitized. The web provides several opportunities, however, for web authors to describe what content looks like, rather than what it means, and this visual description inconveniences and confuses people using screen readers. We focus on the particular instance of this problem where information that is logically tabular is presented using repeated visual templates. We recruited a group of experienced screen reader users and observed them performing a series of tasks designed to elicit tabular behavior. We find that people who make use of tabular operations perform the tasks faster and more successfully than those who do not. We furthermore find that while many users discover the tables we introduced as part of the study, many others do not or do not choose to make use of the tables. We discuss some techniques for enhancing the discoverability of the introduced tables.