In the excellent question Why are images of text, code and mathematical expressions discouraged? it was rightly highlighted in the answers that text, code and mathematical expressions in images cannot be read by screen readers.
When asking and answering questions concerning data in tables, such as Creating Attendance Sheet from acces control output, you are forced into the nasty text extrapolation such as that put together in the question, or using Markdown, for which you can use a Markdown table generator such as Markdown Tables generator.
The trouble with Markdown tables is that when they are wide, they can break like shown here
Super wide column Super wide column Another super wide column
Unless the Markdown content is tabbed to turn it into a code block as shown here
| Super wide column | Super wide column | Another super wide column | | |
|-------------------|-------------------|---------------------------|---|---|
But then on mobile screens, this table is so wide, it goes off (overlaps) the side of the screen.
Then I found out about Jira’s Markdown syntax through this answer on Stack Overflow which outputs an HTML table. Surely this would be more accessible for those with screen readers?
In the comments it is highlighted that tables have always been banned on Stack Overflow due to their habit of being able to completely cause havoc in the page layout.
This was specially true when the pages still used tables to do their layout.
Tables are not encouraged for html page layout purposes, but tables are useful in STEM sites such as Medical Sciences or Psychology & Neuroscience when conveying certain information in a concise format or displaying certain data.
WebAIM has a good write-up on the accessibility issues surrounding badly formed tables on the web.
It is also highlighted in the comments that Jira is a helpline/ticketing software and we wouldn’t be able to use it as such, but surely we could maybe borrow the Markdown methods? Would it be a major issue if we were to move into using methods used by Jira (or similar, such as Trac) on Stack Exchange in order for questions relating to data tables to be able to be formatted better?
