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Technique C8:Using CSS letter-spacing to control spacing within a word

About this Technique

This technique relates to:

This technique applies to all technologies that support CSS.

Description

The objective of this technique is to demonstrate how the visual appearance of spacing in text may be enhanced via style sheets while still maintaining meaningful text sequencing. The CSS letter-spacing property helps developers control the amount of white space between characters. This is recommended over adding blank characters to control the spacing, since the blank characters can change the meaning and pronunciation of the word.

Examples

Example 1: Increasing the spacing between characters in a word

The following CSS would add the equivalent of a space between each character in a level-2 heading:

The CSS

h2 {
  letter-spacing: 1em;
}

The HTML

<h2>Museum</h2>

The rendered result might look something like:

M u s e u m

Related Resources

No endorsement implied.

Tests

Procedure

For each word that appears to have non-standard spacing between characters:

  1. Check whether the CSS letter-spacing property was used to control spacing.

Expected Results

  • Check #1 is true.
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