Accessible lists and tables training resources

Below, you’ll find resources to share with your team and an activity to start making more accessible lists and tables.

To start getting your team or organization to make more accessible lists and tables, we suggest sharing these resources – even 5 minutes is enough to learn more.

You could then use the resources and activity for a live or pre-recorded training or discussion.

Check out Pope Tech’s Monthly Accessibility Focus topics to see all our topics.

Share questions, feedback, and experiences on Twitter
using #AccessibilityFocus.

Resources to share

• Pope Tech’s Accessible lists and tables article that covers why accessible lists and tables matter, what makes them accessible, and how to fix inaccessible lists and tables.
• Pope Tech’s Accessible lists and their impact video, which demos lists read by a screen reader.
• Pope Tech’s Accessible tables and their impact video, which demos tables read by a screen reader.
• WebAIM’s Semantic Structure article
• WebAIM’s layout tables article
• WebAIM’s data tables article
• W3C’s HTML lists
• MDN’s HTML table advanced features and accessibility

Activity

This activity includes making a plan to fix existing lists and tables and a plan on how to create accessible content going forward.

Steps for this activity are also included in Pope Tech’s Accessible lists and tables article, so you could encourage individuals to start finding inaccessible content or thinking of ideas.

Fix existing inaccessible list and table content

1. Identify any list-related and table-related errors or alerts in your content using Pope Tech’s website scanning tool or the Canvas Accessibility Guide. If you don’t have these tools, you can use WebAIM’s free WAVE extension tool.
   • If you’re a Pope Tech user, run an HTML or PDF detail report and configure it for only list-related and table-related results.
   • If you’re a Canvas Accessibility Guide user, test your syllabus, home page, and other pages for one course.
   • WAVE extension tool – Test four pages you contribute to.
2. Fix ten list or table errors or alerts.
3. If there were more than ten issues, make an achievable goal and share that goal with your team or office.
4. BONUS: If you don’t have one already, schedule a monthly accessibility check-in (even if it’s just you) to celebrate progress and remove blockers.

Creating accessible list and table content

Identify who regularly makes and updates content and make sure they know how to create accessible lists and tables, and use the WAVE extension tool to check any new content or updated content to prevent new errors or alerts. Consider these questions as you plan:

• Who is responsible for creating and updating content?
• Do they know how to use the WAVE extension tool, or is training needed?
• Does your content editor make it easy to add headers and captions to tables? Does it add the scope attribute automatically? If not, tables might need to be made or adjusted in HTML.
• Would a table template be helpful? If so, consider making a template of the table in your content editor or in HTML code. Then, only the content needs to be filled in, and the HTML is already accessible.