Designing Accessible Content: Typography, Font Styling, and Structure

There are many design considerations for making your content more accessible to all. Some things to think about and build into your design workflow include:

  • Choose a common font that most users have encountered before.
  • The “serif vs. sans-serif debate” is not a huge deal if you choose a common font family or one that has unique characters.
  • Avoid specialty display fonts or font families that are not unique (ex. letters or numbers that could mirror each other).
  • Your fonts should have a minimum size of 14px (ideally more) and when coded should use relative values.
  • Pay attention to color and contrast! Use tools to check the ratio between the text and background and be wary of gray.
  • Don’t rely on color alone to signify information (ex. “click on the red button”).
  • Clearly define paragraph and letter spacing.
  • Do not let the overall width of the content exceed 80 characters (40 characters for logograms).
  • Avoid paragraph alignment (such as justified) which creates whitespace within the content.