There was a particularly extreme trend back then (well - probably more during the 90s) where websites were mainly big Photoshop images sliced up into a lot of nested tables of dizzying complexity. Screen readers off course struggled with that as it was rather hard to determine the order of the content. I'm not sure how much trouble they have with more minimal use of tables for presentation.
> where websites were mainly big Photoshop images sliced up into a lot of nested tables of dizzying complexity
Replace "nested tables" with "nested divs", and this is exactly how web development today still looks, at least if your company employs a designer. Slicing is still a thing.