Doing Neat Tables Blind: Wrapping, Placement and Appearance?

Hi, I'm a legally blind user whose new to LaTeX and chose it because of
BibTeX, the math symbols and as the document formatting is just text,
thus the semantics are totally accessible with speech (screeen reader).
Ideally I would like to delegate all visual formatting to LaTeX itself
and simply code the document semantics textually. This is very
problematic, however, in tables. Here are some of the most prominent
problems in the order of importance, feel free to snip:

line wrapping:

Using the p column specifier does allow me to set the cell width
relatively to the text width, but it does *not* ensure that the lines
will fit the cells and the cells don't run outside the page, even under
sloppy parsing which I'm using.

One could manully add line breaks or widen the columns such that no
automatic wrapping is needed. Here the fundamental problem is that the
DVi output is not screen reader accessible, and even in PDF, I reckon
one cannot tell with Acrobat's Win32 accessibility support when content
won't fit the page. A physical dump in plain text, that's easily
Braille readable, i.e. max 80 chars per line, might help in this. As
would more verbose errors telling me exactly which bit of text goes out
side the page, where, and why, preferrably in a form that's nice reading
with speech. I haven't been able to make much sense out of the overful
hbox warnings, though haven't had time to seriously look into it yet.

I wonder if there are modules that could do automatic wrapping of text
within tables ideally also making the columns neat looking in terms of
their width? HTML can do this after all, and as Web browsers surely
aren't ment for type setting, one would naively think the algorithm for
doing this is straight forward and could be whipped up as a LaTeX macro,
too.

My Googling brought up a package called tabularx that adds to table
formatting. I do have the docs in a DVi file under MikTeX but as that
format is inaccessible, how do I get a plain text dump of the contents
to learn how to use the package, or is that even possible? Googling
didn't bring up the docs. I'm incidentally familiar with CPAN but
haven't visited CTAN yet.

Reading with speech, I don't really notice most kinds of ugly formatting
on text, the only thing that matters in terms of navigation is that
paragraphs are denoted by physical line breaks and that headings should
be regular expression matchable in plain text, in large docs that is.

Text alignment:

The way I've managed tables so far is to use the p specifier and asking
for sighted help for figuring out the column widths. Using P, however,
does mean that the text is justified I'm told, so how could I make it
left or right align in stead? Using L and R is one way to do it but that
excludes being able to specify a column width, in stead.

Heading semantics:

One accessibility problem in LaTeX is that it doesn't semantically
recognize table headings as a specific element. Rather my understanding
is that they are just cells that have different visual formatting. Is
there a macro package letting me use a different command name for table
headings and specifying their format only once? Compare to CSS and TH in
HTML. Also when HTMl or PDF is produced, are those tables accessible?
Normally the screen reader's ability to on-demand read a table heading
for the focused cell is dependent on the headings being marked up
properly. Else the reader would have to programmatically, heuristically
guess table headingness based on spatial layout similarly to how they
guess control labels in the mainstream GUIs.

Placement:

Is there a bullet proof way of automatically ensuring that tables aren't
broken across pages and still end up in the right place for the reader?
For example, I have a subsection in which I \ref to a table and that
section also happens to contain an accessible tree, i.e. an itemize
environment. So, I'd like LaTeX to try to keep the table in the same
subchapter in which the first ref to it is made, such that it neither
breaks across pages nor interrupts the itemized list. Any ideas? I feel
like it would be easiest to write code for this. All in all I'm
intrigued by the very powerful and speech friendly, dynamically typed
language Lua being integrated into TeX.

Stuff already tried:

I've Googled with words like latex automatic table wrapping, read the
table section of the WikiBook and that of a Finnish LaTeX guide book,
and casually browsed through the TeX FAQ as well. I've also consulted
two local LaTeX gurus and a remote one, one of whom said I should have
been using docbook with speech in stead. I asked in blind programming,
too, in which they told me to ignore the overfull box warnings and also
recommended docbook for formatting semantics.

Since I had lots of unformatted tables in ASCII tab separated anyway, I
managed to save quite a bit of time by writing a Perl script that
outputs LaTeX table code including the headings, captions and labels,
and automatically computed relative column widhts based solely on the
number of columns.

I guess the big question in the long run would be, given enough macroes
and patience, is LaTeX the right tool for blind folks formatting their
documents such as academic papers, provided that no sensible way of
examining the DVI output emerges? the good thing is that I've learned to
use BibTeX and now the math notation in the Wikipedia alt texts makes a
great deal more sense, too, since it is just TeX in math mode I think.
If there are better tools than LaTeX for the blind, can I use BibTeX
independently of LaTeX itself in any plain text or marked up file?

Any help appreciated.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
.

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