How to Build an Accessible Data Table in 2026

The Crimes Against Tabular Data In the pursuit of building "custom" web applications, frontend developers often make terrible architectural crimes against the fundamental building blocks of the web. The most common victim? The humble <table>\ . Wanting to implement massive paddings, sticky headers, and weird column collapses, developers routinely abandon the actual HTML <table>\ element in favor of a monstrosity built entirely of nested <div>\ s and CSS Flexbox. This is a catastrophe for web accessibility. When a screen-reader encounters a standard HTML table, it announces rows and columns explicitly, allowing visually impaired users to understand the relational matrix of the data they are hearing. When a screen-reader encounters your custom flexbox mess? It just reads an incoherent list of flat text strings with zero spatial context. Building It Correctly Building modern, gorgeous data tables requires trusting the semantic HTML tags while leveraging modern CSS properties. Let's look a