Accessibility

Near the end of this list sits l’ordre de tabulation, and it holds a word that looks translatable and is not. In French, la tabulation is the key at the left of the keyboard and the stop it jumps to: la touche de tabulation, poser une tabulation. So l’ordre de tabulation is the order in which that key walks a reader through a form, which is exactly what somebody who cannot use a mouse depends on. English went the other way entirely. It kept the table and dropped the key: to tabulate is to set figures out in rows and columns, and « the tabulation of the results » is a spreadsheet, never a keyboard. The key itself is « tab », a clipping so old that few people still hear « tabulator » inside it, and the thing this entry names is « tab order ». Writing « tabulation order » in an accessibility report is therefore not a small stylistic slip: it sends the reader looking for a table. The two words share the Latin tabula, the board or the plank, and that is all they share.