Elf Sternberg

The major Windows commercial screen readers should be fine, if they can handle Excel or Access then an HTML table is a piece of cake. People just need to rummage through the help to find out how. One problem with screen readers is there are so many functions, relying on different keyboard key combos, that noone knows them all. I can only speak for Jaws for Windows, but the combo for version 9 and earlier is control+alt+arrow keys to move around them. I believe V10 uses the windows key instead. Without these keys they default to reading through left to right, top to bottom, as the table is in the HTML.

A good tool for testing is the free open source reader NVDA at www.nvda-project.org, they have a specific mode that makes the speech appear on the screen as visible text for sighted testers. They've also had sizable grants from both Mozilla (for promotion of NVDA and improved Firefox support, which was originally the preferred browser) and Microsoft (improved IE and Windows 7 support). They aren't quite Jaws, but they are doing a great job and it's free for any use including commercial. I use it as my backup for when Jaws crashes, all software crashes some time and when you're reliant on one program for all your usage of a computer you need a backup.