DEV Community

Discussion on: Why we should default to Tabs instead of Spaces for an 'accessible first' environment

Collapse
 
overengineered profile image
Juozas Kontvainis

I agree that accessibility is a concern in tabs vs spaces debate. I even tried using tabs about 6 years ago. It wasn't a great experience. Code in IDE looked fine. However I don't just look at my code in IDE - source control GUI app, git management web interface (my workplace wasn't using GitHub) all rendered tabs assuming 8 space indentation. So the result was accessibility issues even for individuals without special accessibility needs. In the ideal world tabs would be the best choice - the tools I was using would be easily adaptable for individual needs. In the real messy world the tools were developed with time constraints and did not have easy options to change the rendering options. So while I agree that tabs are best in principle, choosing spaces can be more practical, even when considering accessibility.