• Success Criterion 1.3.1
  • Conformance level A
  • W3C reference F33

Text Columns Faked With Spaces Instead of Real Table Markup

1.3.1 — Info and Relationships

Scenario

Setting

A childcare-booking service's scheduling page

What’s wrong

Spaces/tabs are used to fake side-by-side columns in plain text — read aloud, the lines interleave into nonsense.

Example 

<pre>
Provider        Time      Spots
Sunny Days      9:00 AM   3
Little Acorns   1:30 PM   1
</pre>

Why it matters

A parent using a screen reader hears the row as one jumbled string of names and numbers. Nothing separates provider, time, and spot count.

How to test

Select the 'columns' with your cursor and copy-paste into a plain text editor: if spaces/tabs were used instead of real CSS columns, the text runs together out of order.

How to fix

Whitespace only lines up characters visually; a table lines up meaning for assistive tech too.

<table>
  <tr><th>Provider</th><th>Time</th><th>Spots</th></tr>
  <tr><td>Sunny Days</td><td>9:00 AM</td><td>3</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Little Acorns</td><td>1:30 PM</td><td>1</td></tr>
</table>

Outcome

A parent hears each provider's time and spot count as one clear group, not a run-on line of numbers.

Who is affected

Screen reader users scanning the childcare schedule can't tell which time or spot count belongs to which provider.

Learn more

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