HTML Table to JSON

I am updating a tool that allows users to customize a large data table to their needs. It’s sort of like a progressive insurance for seminaries in that it helps students compare information on about 30 US seminaries so they can make an informed decision about where to go.
My initial approach when I built it 4-5 years ago was to embed JSON data in the HTML page and then use JavaScript to convert that JSON data into a table based on the user’s choices.
But there are a few problems with this approach.

1. The data is not accessible to screen readers.
2. The data is not accessible to those without JavaScript
3. Embedding a lot of JSON data in an HTML page isn’t a very good idea. It should be a separate cached .js file, but I can’t do
   
   that since the data often changes and it still wouldn’t address #1 and #2

So I’ve decided in the new version to start with a large <table> and then turn that table into JSON data using the <thead> region as the JSON labels. Then I can take that data and customize it based on the user’s choices. Interestingly the overall data size is a bit smaller since writing a <td> and </td> for each peice of information is actually smaller than writing the header name and quotes over and over.
Here’s the simple table to JSON code. It assumes the first row is has header names and removes spaces and lower cases it.

function tableToJson(table) {
var data = []; // first row needs to be headers var headers = [];
for (var i=0; i<table.rows[0].cells.length; i++) {
 headers[i] = table.rows[0].cells[i].innerHTML.toLowerCase().replace(/ /gi,'');
}
// go through cells
for (var i=1; i<table.rows.length; i++) {
var tableRow = table.rows[i]; var rowData = {};
for (var j=0; j<tableRow.cells.length; j++) {
rowData[ headers[j] ] = tableRow.cells[j].innerHTML;
} data.push(rowData);
}
return data; 
}

Below are links to the two pages for comparison. Please note that the site where the “new” page is is still a work in progress and won’t be launched for a month or two.

• Old: http://www.dts.edu/admissions/feesandexpenses/seminarycomparison/
• New: http://new.dts.edu/resources/seminarycomparison/