Typography for Web Accessibility: Auditing Fifty Sites
I audited fifty websites for typography accessibility and found the same five problems on most of them. Here is what they are and how to fix them. I audited the typography of fifty websites for an accessibility compliance report, and the findings were depressingly consistent. Most sites fail the same five accessibility checks, and most of the fixes are straightforward once you know what to look for. The commonality of the problems suggests that typography accessibility is not well understood even among designers who care about accessibility in general. Here is what I found and how to address each issue. Problem One: Text Below Minimum Size The most widespread issue was body text set below sixteen pixels. I found text at fourteen, thirteen, and even twelve pixels on a significant minority of sites. Small text is harder to read for everyone and functionally inaccessible for users with mild visual impairment. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommend a minimum of sixteen pixels for body text, with larger sizes for critical content. The fix is to set body text at sixteen pixels minimum and to use relative units like rem rather than pixels, so that the text scales when users change their browser font size. Sites that use pixel units for font size often override the browser font size setting, which is itself an accessibility violation. Relative units respect user preferences by default.