Question

This is a government financial table so I can’t reorder the columns. The first column is an account code, the second column is the name of the account. If I do:

<thead><tr><th scope="col">Account Code</th><th scope="col">Account Name</th></tr></thead>
<tbody><tr><td>12345</td><th scope="row">Fish and Wildlife</th></tr>
...
</tbody>

Will validation barf on that and will screen readers parse it correctly?

Answer 1

In the specifications they do not specify a need for the th to appear as the first column in a table row, and so you should be able to put the th wherever you want.

Table cells may either contain "header" information (see the TH element) or "data" (see the TD element). 

HTML w3 specs