Find and Seek: Assessing the Impact of Table Navigation on Information Look-up with a Screen Reader

Web designers use visual cues such as layout and typography to make pages easier to navigate and understand. Yet, screen readers generally ignore these features and present page information in a linear audio stream. We investigate whether transcoding the visual semantics of grid-based layouts to tables supports better navigation. In a controlled experiment, participants navigated re-written pages significantly faster when doing data synthesis tasks and more accurately when looking up information meeting multiple criteria. Participants rated their table navigation experience better in terms of effort, memorization, ease of navigation, understanding of page information, and confidence in submitted answers. Participants attributed these gains to the table structure’s support for (1) predictable audio presentation, (2) adopting an appropriate search strategy, and (3) making sense of page content. Contrary to the established belief that tables are inaccessible, our results show that tables can facilitate navigation when users need to synthesize across page content.