Stanford Online Accessibility Program

Accessible ISO-8859-1 Table

Often the tools we use are readily available on the 'net, yet for whatever reason the sources are less than accessible to users of Adaptive Technology.

A case in point is the table of iso8859-1 character codes and named entities. While this large table is available in numerous locations across the web, each instance we uncovered was not accessible. Often the table was simply visually laid out and enclosed in the <pre> element - hardly accessible to screen readers and other alternative devices.

We thought an accessible version might be useful to those AT users who may need to reference this important Standards document. We have reformulated it into an accessible table, using the appropriate semantic markup elements and attributes, such as adding the "SCOPE" attribute to the <th> element (<th scope="colgroup">).

Why is this document so important?

Have you ever seen text that appears as a series of untelligible characters such as a "boxes" on a web page? Have you ever wondered why?

It's about the character set being used by your browser, and the fact that the authored page has made a request for a character which has not been mapped to the Standard. There are many reasons why this may be happening - perhaps the character set / font files required are not present on your system (for example, foreign language fonts or glyphs, or the page developer has "copied and pasted" content created in a word processor and has copied over specialized symbols or accented letters that were authored in a different character set. The ASCII character set is not sufficient for a global information system such as the Web, so (X)HTML uses the much more complete character set called the Universal Character Set (UCS). The ISO-8859-1 / Latin 1 character set is a subset of UCS. It covers most accented letters and symbols used in Western based languages.

However, for these accented letters or other symbols to render correctly in your web browser, their numeric or named character entity must be referenced. That is where this table comes in. The complete Latin 1 / iso8859-1 character set is here. Authors should use either the named entity or numeric code reference to ensure that their content renders correctly.

This is the chart for HTML 4.x, but also applies to XHTML 1.x.

Further Resources

• W3C - Named character entities in HTML 4.0
• W3C - HTML Document Representation

The ISO-8859-1 table

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