Tables on the web accessible?: unfortunately not!

Web accessibility guidelines, in particular, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible. They have technical guidance on making certain structures accessible such as tables. Even though there are many studies that investigate the accessibility of certain types of web sites or web sites from certain countries, to our knowledge, there is no specific study that looks at the accessibility of tables on the web. In this paper, we present a systematic study that analyzes the accessibility of more than 16,000 table elements, crawled from more than 900 different web pages. This study shows that tables are still widely used for layout, and the guidelines related to data tables in WCAG are not followed. Our research is vital in demonstrating the need for smart systems that automatically handle the accessibility of structures such as tables.