Table headers <th> elements must have data cells they describe

Hello

I was wondering if you could provide more clarity on an issue a lot of automated tooling brings up as 1.3.1 but I can’t really see the issue.

If you have a table on the page on page load which visually is just a row of column headers until you load some results and populate the table, does this fail 1.3.1 as the <th> elements don’t have data cells they introduce?

The semantic mark-up is correct and correspond with what the content is visually - a table which only contains table headers in the first instance. I understand this relates primarily to screen reader users, but as far as I can tell, they are correctly reading exactly what is shown visually on the page so I don’t understand how this is 1.3.1. The semantic mark-up is correct. The table data cells just haven’t loaded yet.

Please can you provide clarification?

Thanks

Sarah