Tables didn’t work very well with screen readers if memory serves me right. That and it produced a tag soup. Ironically people moved to divs and spans, which w

Tables didn’t work very well with screen readers if memory serves me right. That and it produced a tag soup. Ironically people moved to divs and spans, which when combined with the old box model issues, made the problem even worse. The semantic web elements in HTML5 was an attempt to fix those issues.