encyclo - 6:55 pm on Feb 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Centred text on a table this size? ;)

You might want to pick out this as a usability issue as it is less than ideal for readability. But taking into account the age of the page (the file dates from 1998/1999) the reason why the text is centered is that modern browsers are behaving differently than when the page was authored, when quirks mode (the only rendering mode in those days) left-aligned the text. Dig out your copy of Netscape 4 and you'll see. :)

However, check out some the markup for that table:

<H2>Priority 1 checkpoints</H2>
<DIV class="table">
<TABLE [b]summary="Table of priority 1 checkpoints, organized by category and sorted by checkpoint number."[/b] border>
<TR class="checkhead"><TH>In General (Priority 1)
[b]<TH>[/b]Yes<TH>No<TH>N/A</TR>
<TR class="checkinfo">

<TD><A href="wai-pageauth.html#tech-text-equivalent">1.1</A>&nbsp;Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content). <em>This includes</em>: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, [b]<abbr title="American Standard Code for Information Interchange">ascii</abbr>[/b] art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.

The bold parts show some specific ways of increasing the accessibility of the page: a summary attribute which describes the contents of the table, the use of th instead of td for headings, and the use of semantic markup such as abbr with an appropriate title for the abbreviation.