Talkin’ Tables — WebAIM Conference 2024

I spoke at the 2024 Web Accessibility in Mind Conference (in partnership with PopeTech). As soon as the video is available I will embed it.

This post is a stub to hold the links during my talk and will be updated sometime within a few days after my talk with more nuggets if needed.

Updated 27 October to add the video from YouTube:

The text in the slides is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible. I do not make the PowerPoint file available because my slides have been taken and used by others before, and I believe they should have to exert at least some modicum of effort to steal from me.

Related

These posts of mine informed the talk either directly or because of a related concept. Probably ignore some of the older ones. They don’t get many updates and may be based on old technologies or techniques (or both).

• Don’t Turn a Table into an ARIA Grid Just for a Clickable Row, November 2023
• Avoid Spanning Table Headers, February 2023
• Brief Note on Calendar Tables, August 2022
• It’s Mid-2022 and Browsers (Mostly Safari) Still Break Accessibility via Display Properties, July 2022
• Column Headers and Browser Support, February 2022
• Accessible Cart Tables?, January 2022
• Scroll Snap Challenges, July 2021
• Multi-Column Sortable Table Experiment, June 2021
• Sortable Table Columns, April 2021
• Under-Engineered Responsive Tables, November 2020
• Sortable Table Column Mad Libs, September 2020
• Block Links, Cards, Clickable Regions, Rows, Etc., February 2020
• Fixed Table Headers, January 2020
• Table with Expando Rows, September 2019
• Uniquely Labeling Fields in a Table, May 2019
• Functions to Add ARIA to Tables and Lists, May 2018
• Display: Contents Is Not a CSS Reset, May 2018
• Tables, JSON, CSS, ARIA, RWD, TLAs…, April 2018
• Tables, CSS Display Properties, and ARIA, February 2018
• A Responsive Accessible Table, November 2017
• Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables, November 2017
• Keyboard and Overflow, February 2016
• It’s OK to Use Tables, July 2012

The Socials

There was feedback in the Zoom chat, on Mastodon, and on the artist formerly known as Twitter.

Listening to @aardrian talking about tables and I want to replace most of my WAI tables tutorial with the 💩 emoji.

(That said, the tables tutorial is now with their new parents, and hopefully taken good care of.)

#webAimConf

Watching @aardrian speak about HTML tables as part of @WebAIM's conference. In a session full of great lines, my favorite has been "I hate that these are common enough errors that I have to dedicate a whole slide to it, but here we are."#WebAimConf

The Zoom chat was active. The quotes that follow are time-stamped to the Eastern, but when the video is posted you can probably use them to find out what I said or showed that prompted the comment.

Table accessibility is sexy!

I feel that way about ALL accessibility. :)

Adrian 😂

This was me talking about ARIA grids:

“tables with an inflated ego” 🤣

I may have come to a talk that’s quite out of my field, but I’m enjoying trying to follow along!

@caitlin honestly that’s one of my favorite things to do at conferences. I figure it’s good to stretch my brain out a bit.

print styles 🙂

Seems like both just yesterday and 30 years ago…

I believe this is the video that was mentioned by Kevin Powell – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czZ1PvNW5hk

Logical properties FTW!

Thank you for covering right-to-left languages – as a native speaker of one I can say we often get forgotten!

Folks recognized that the photos in the slides were IKEA product shots:

These intro slides are sponsored by a large Swedish furniture store 😂

LOL

Haha I did wonder or if they were AI to match the puns 😄

Frankly, I considered this one a joke all on its own (not a laugh-out-loud one). Even if it didn’t land, I’m glad someone got something out of it.

“Button: Remove George Orwell”,” a memoir for our times

Do we need to start heckling?

Yes somehow every designer and developers thinks it’s a good ux 😄

This makes me want to redecorate my house

I have 4 of those planter pots

There’s are ace solutions!

Thanks to both of our ASL interpreters, who are helping us make this presentation more accessible.

i like videos with screen reader 🙂 explains quite a bit.

That was extremely helpful – but will need a re-watch ;)

Probably an AI image that’s what normally happens to me with background images online hehe 🙃

the extra chairs are the aria additional attributes that aren’t needed

I loved that you provided what a screen reader would sound like for those who’ve never tested their designs with a reader.

Glad to hear that while it was more technical than some folks might have expected, they still seemed to get something out of it.

thank you! i don’t have a technical background but this was still very insightful and engaging

I love technical! Just need to practice and solidify new learning

This was an awesome talk.