Examples
Empty Cells

Empty Cells

You may have noticed empty cells in previous table examples. It is common to find an empty top-left cell in tables as well as tables with empty data cells. In both cases, we have determined it works best across multiple screen readers to tag these cells as <td> elements containing a non-breaking space character. In HTML, you can specify this with a &nbsp; or &#160; entity. This ensures that the user is informed that the cell exists and is blank.

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Header (<th>) cells should never be empty; the purpose of header cells is to label data cells, so if there is no text, there is no label.

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  1. In PXE, you must use a &#160; entity for a non-breaking space. &nbsp; does not work.
  2. Many unremediated PXE tables contain empty top-left <th> cells. These must be converted to <td>&#160;</td>.