One of the stranger accessibility myths that I often run into is that merged cells in tables are to be avoided at all costs. This is entirely antithetical to semantic structuring of data and really points to a larger issue: often, folks who are doing and talking about accessibility have no concept of tabular structure, data relationships, and the importance of context. This goes both ways – often, folks that I receive documents from will have put multiple pieces of data in a single cell, either because they don’t know how to make the cell border invisible, or because they’re afraid to merge a cell that spans all the pieces of data.
One of my favorite accessibility myths is this pervasive idea that alternate text is some kind of accessibility panacea. I get it – it’s theoretically a thing that content creators of any skill level can do to make their content more accessible. Because of these things (and because it is technically a required attribute on <img> tags in HTML), it seems to be one of the first things people learn about accessibility. For the uninitiated, alternate text (from here on out, alt text) is metadata attached to an image that assistive tech (such as a screen reader) will use to present a description of an image (since we don’t all have neural network coprocessors to do deep machine-learning and describe images for us).
This is all very good, if we have a raster-based image with no other information to work with. The problem is, we should almost never have that image to begin with. Very few accessibility problems are actually solved with alt text. For starters, raster images have a fixed resolution. And when users with limited vision (but not enough-so to warrant use of a screen reader) attempt to zoom in on these as they are wont to do, that ability is limited. Best case scenario, the image is at print resolution, 300dpi. This affords maybe a 300% zoom, and even then there may be artifacting. Another common pitfall is that images (particularly of charts and the like) are often used as a crutch when a user can’t figure out a clean way to present their information. Often this means color is used as a means of communicating information (explicitly prohibited by §508), or it means that the information is such a jumble that users with learning disabilities are going to have incredible difficulty navigating it.
There is a delusion that I deal with, professionally, day in and day out. That nearly any piece of authoring software, be it Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, has some inbuilt mechanism for assessing the accessibility of a document. Before I get into the details, let me just come out and say that if you are not already an accessibility professional, these tools cannot help you. I understand the motivation, but in my experience, these things do more harm than good. They allow unversed consumers to gain a false sense of understanding about the output of their product. That sounds incredibly condescending, but that’s honestly how it should work when you’re talking about fields that require extensive training.