Table Navigation Mode

A screen reader feature that allows users to navigate within data tables by moving a virtual cursor cell-by-cell in two dimensions — by row and by column — rather than reading content linearly. Introduced by Ogane and Asakawa in 1998 and subsequently adopted by virtually all commercial screen readers, table navigation mode attaches to HTML <table> elements and enables users to understand the relationships between data in rows and columns. Without this mode, tabular data is extremely difficult for screen reader users to comprehend. A significant web accessibility challenge is that many visual datasets are not marked up with <table> tags, preventing screen reader users from using this navigation mode.