Below are my suggestions for update to the tables portions of
the UA guidelines.

Regards/Harvey Bingham
hbingham@acm.org
(781)862-6908
----------------

WAI Accessibility Guidelines:  User Agent
                         W3C Working Draft WD-WAI-USERAGENT-19980703

4.6 Alternative Representations of Tables

   1.[PRIORITY 2]
     Give access to table summary information. User agents must give users access to the value of the
     "summary" attribute of the TABLE element.  New: The value should give the purpose and
     structural information about the table.

   2.[PRIORITY 2]
     Allow the user to create and control serialized views of tables.

     Tabular information can confuse users with certain dependent user agents
     New: that are unaware of cell content display requiring more than one line.
     User agents should be able to
     serialize the table -- render it one cell at a time -- to reduce confusion.

     Users should be able to specify whether they want the cells rendered row by row, or column by column.
     New: The rendering order must respect the writing direction for the table, left-to-right, or right-to-left.
   
     Users may choose different mechanisms for rendering cell header information (e.g., render row and
     New: /or
     column header information before each cell, render row header information once at the beginning of the
     row,
             New: ask for cell identification,
   
etc.) The HTML 4.0 specification (see [HTML40], chapter 11 and
     in particular section 11.4.3) and
     the CSS 2 specification (see [CSS2], chapters 12, 17, and 19) describe mechanisms for structuring
     tables, identifying headers, and rendering them in accessible ways.

     See also the section on table navigation for related information.

     Note. Table serialization is important for tables used to structure tabular information as well as those used
     to lay out blocks of information.

6.6 Table Navigation

   1.[PRIORITY 2]
     Allow the user to use the keyboard to move the selection between cells in a table (notably
     left/right within a row and up/down within a column).

     NEW:  Allow the user to determine the structure of tables (how many rows and columns, in each of its sections)
     and any nesting of tables in cells of other tables.

     A table navigation mechanism should also provide the user with information about the current table cell
     (see the guidelines on alternative representations of tables).