The myth of the accessible typeface
We could have seen it coming. When accessibility entered the cultural zeitgeist, more attention was paid; it featured more and more in the titles of talks, and became a part of creative briefs. But with this important reprioritisation came a lot of misinformation and misleading guidance. When good things get a front-row seat, unfortunately a lot of unnecessary white noise seems to follow. Now we’ve got more questions than answers, and are afraid of putting a foot wrong, lest we alienate an entire segment of our audience.
On the client’s part, the potential energy of this accessibility anxiety often gets converted into a hunt for some sort of quick-to-run-through checklist that guarantees compliance. Following mandates becomes more important than tailoring solutions for their audience. Meanwhile, designers become desperate, and seek out easy answers. They overly restrict their process, and end up resenting accessibility as an enemy of their creativity.
This sets the stage for LinkedIn slideshow charlatans, overzealous design press headlines claiming cures for dyslexia, and hobbyist researchers tweaking the variables to produce a commercially beneficial result. Anyone claiming to have the one definitive truth, while only adding to the cacophony obscuring it, gets a turn at the mic.
The Limits of Standardised Guidelines
Official or standardised guidelines, though well-intentioned, are hobbled by the insurmountable vastness of their remit, and inadvertently contribute to all the confusion. The US Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as of 2010, calls for “sans-serif characters” to be used on teller screens. While this may have made sense for old, low-resolution displays, where pixel economy was critical, it continues to cast doubt on serif typeface use today, when we have Retina screens greeting us everywhere we look.
When accessibility is so pertinent and so high-stakes, but so intimidating and confusing at the same time, what’s a designer to do? So far, it’s clear that the answer isn’t solely in the hands of multinational commissions, underfunded charities, go-getter journalists, or, least of all, a grumpy type designer like me. Try as I might, I can’t push against that tide alone. The solution is instead a thoughtful, patient design practitioner, with a nose trained for the unmistakable stench of too-good-to-be-true – someone who applies the same muscle memory trained on tackling unrealistic creative briefs to sorting fact from fiction, the effective from the inconsequential.
To those who want to step up, here’s the good news: much of what there is to know about accessibility, specifically when it comes to using type, is actually old news. You might be surprised to hear that, in my 15 years of being a type designer, and paying attention to legibility and readability research, I’ve never once been surprised by the conclusions of a well-run legibility study. There hasn’t emerged, in all this time, an unprecedented result, a bit of wild card data that upturned our understanding of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to optimising legibility. Instead, what happens time and time again is the validation of long-established best practices.
Timeless Rules for Accessible Type
Appropriate style usage, a tall x-height, disambiguated letterforms, and proportional spacing all help improve the reading experience. Your favourite expressive, ornamental script is better suited for titles and headlines. If you’re designing something that uses a lot of text at small sizes, maybe don’t use something that has a tiny lowercase set, dwarfed by monumental capitals (remember that most of the letters we see are lowercase). As I mentioned in my last column, opt for letters that are not composed entirely of geometric shapes; they are more challenging for our visual system to disambiguate. Don’t track the text so tightly that the letters merge into each other, creating prodigious ligatures. Unlike what some guidelines suggest, maybe don’t use Arial – who died and made it the standard bearer of accessible type? – it is, to say the least, very badly spaced.
Following these will set you on the right path. But what will elevate your design practice, and hopefully ease your mind, is to know that there are no easy answers, no one-size-fits-all solution that works for everyone 100% of the time.
Accessibility isn’t a tick-box exercise.
We have to acknowledge that our capabilities are limited, and even if we design something that complies with all rules and regulations, it will not work for some. We have to embrace it as a sliding scale we get to push toward the right end.
Remember that, when discussing accessibility, we’re considering the needs of people with wide-ranging impairments and disabilities, none of whom interact with design in the exact same way as the next person. There are those who have reduced or impacted vision, then there are those who have phonological processing difficulties – not to mention social, cultural, linguistic, and economic factors that compound the difference in the reading experience among them.
All the more reason to not treat accessibility as a barrier to creativity. I promise, even the most stubborn aesthetes can incorporate some best practices in their work without compromising their intentions. You like that tightly tracked lightweight grotesque look? Go for it, but know that tightness can work against the eyes’ saccadic movements and slow down letterform recognition. To counteract this, you might consider only using this for short headlines, set at very large point sizes. Are you dead set on that pale grey and medium grey colour combo for the new municipal website? Alright, it’s not ideal, but you can make up for that lack of colour contrast by including a high-contrast toggle that allows the user to change the way they view the site. If you have to use Arial – I know, some of you do – be aware of its shortcomings, and account for them.