Improving the accessibility of aurally rendered HTML tables

Abstract

Current techniques employed to aurally render HTML tables often result in output that is very difficult for sight-impaired users to understand. This paper proposes TTPML, an XML-compliant markup language, which facilitates the generation of prose descriptions of tabular information. The markup language enables content creators to specify contextual reinforcement of, and linear navigation through, tabular information. The markup language may be applied to pre-existing Web content and is reusable across multiple tables. TTPML may be interpreted by origin servers, proxy servers, or browsers. We believe that our approach benefits sight-impaired users by improving accessibility to tabular information.