“If certain things aren’t designed in a way which is friendly towards my screen reader, if I struggle to navigate pages of notes or what have you, then I find I just give up. …It very rarely happens, but there have been times, like for the last year we had presentations we had to do for French. Otherwise we used to have to produce a sheet that went with the presentation, like a document, and I used to have to get that e-mailed to me. Now if there were tables in that, you had to set them out in a very standard way, you couldn’t have a non-standard table, one of those funny shaped things, you’d have to have just a plain table. If you’d pulled it off a website, well fine, but then edit it, because otherwise I can’t read it.” David –  Politics and French

WebAim provide very good examples alongside their articel on Creating Accessible Tables

“Here is a table which was created for visual effect:

The visual user will read: “Basement Toilets Must Flush UP!”

The screen reader will hear (or feel via Braille): “Basement UP! Toilets Flush Must”