Never spread words apart with real spaces
W E L C O M E, spelled with spaces to make a heading look airy. That is the whole of F32, a documented failure under the meaningful sequence rule and one of the very few that automation settles on its own. The scope is wider than the space bar. Tabs, line breaks, carriage returns and the non-breaking space entity all count, and the entity is the one a content management system produces and a space-run pattern match misses. Two exemptions are written into the technique. Spaces inside an initialism are fine, since they change nothing about how it is understood and often help. Extra spaces between whole words are fine too, because the words are still words. What breaks is a word that is no longer one word, so nothing can search for it, spell-check it, or say it.
How we find it in an audit
A pattern match finds single characters separated by spaces across a whole site in seconds, which is why this is the strongest scanner-first case in its family. Then a reviewer reads each hit, because the same pattern catches initialisms, code samples and columns of aligned data, all of which pass. We search the entity form separately, since it renders as nothing visible and is where the surviving cases hide. The repair is letter-spacing in CSS, which gets the look without touching the word.
How affected users experience it
A screen reader pronounces what it is given. Given W E L C O M E as seven separate letters, it spells them out one at a time, and the heading of your page arrives as an unreadable string. Some voices add a pause after each. For a reader using text-to-speech because reading is hard rather than because they cannot see, that is worse than no heading at all, since it sounds like a code they are supposed to decipher. Nobody can find the word with a page search either, including the person who wrote it.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
<h1 class="spread">WELCOME</h1>
<!-- .spread { letter-spacing: 0.5em } -->Fails
<h1>W E L C O M E</h1>
<!-- And its quieter twin: --> <h1>H E L L O</h1>The other techniques filed under this rule
12 guides on this site are filed under 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence. W3C documents this one as a failure of that rule, so it describes a way the rule gets broken rather than a way to pass it.
- C6sufficientKeep source order meaningful when CSS repositions content
- C8sufficientSpace letters with CSS, not blank characters
- C27sufficientMatch DOM order to visual order
- G57sufficientPut content in a meaningful reading order
- H34sufficientKeep mixed-direction text reading in the right order
- H56sufficientFix nested right-to-left text with the dir attribute
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique F32: Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.2 due to using white space characters to control spacing within a word. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.