In an attempt to make it easier for emacspeak users to read Web pages with tables, I have written an extension to W3 which converts tables to a linear format. I'm sure there's more work to be done on this code, but I'm releasing it now, so users can start benefitting from it as soon as possible. The extension comes in two parts: a new module, w3-detabulate.el, which you should load from your .emacs file if you want to use this, and a path to w3-display.el. I am including them as MIME attachments to this message.
new W3 module to straighten out tables
patch to w3-display.el to make w3-detabulate work