rendered paste body<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Table linearization experiment</title>
<style>
table {
table-layout:fixed;
padding:0;
margin:0;
border-width:0;
border-collapse:collapse;
width:100%;
}
td {
padding:0;
margin:0;
}
#header { background-color: pink }
#sideMenu {background-color:orange; width:100px}
#content, #pan {background-color:blue; }
#pan {background-color:red;}
#footer {background-color:green}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Linearize those two and notice they are the same to a screen reader:
</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" id="header">h</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="sideMenu"><p>
m
</p>
<p>
o
</p></td>
<td id="content">c</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" id="footer">f</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p></p>
<table>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" id="header">h</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="pan"></td>
<td id="sideMenu" rowspan="2">m</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="content">c</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" id="footer">f</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>