Best Practices
8 Font Size
In this section, we review the two main concerns regarding font size on the web.
What is font size?
Font size is the size of text visible on the screen.
Who are you doing this for?
Who benefits?
Making font size accessible is essential for students with temporary or permanent low vision.
The practice also benefits (among others) students who:
- Have ADHD
- Have cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia
- Spend a large portion of their day looking at a screen
- Are fatigued
- Have motor disabilities that make clicking on text challenging
What do you need to do?
There are two main concerns when working with font sizes:
- Ensuring that default font sizes are not too small.
- Ensuring that text can be expanded to 200% on websites.[1]
Keep in mind these recommendations and guidelines:
- Use 12 point for body text. For most documents, body text should be around 12 points. Small fonts may be illegible for some audiences.
- Use 9 point for footnotes. If a document contains footnotes or endnotes, the minimum size should be 9 points.
- The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) recommend ensuring that text can be zoomed to 200%. As well, for webpages, we recommend using liquid layouts[2] that can accommodate 200% text.
Attributions
- Adapted from “Accessibility Toolkit—2nd Edition” by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray (a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC) licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- "Font Size on the Web," Accessibility and Usability at Penn State, accessed April 17, 2018, http://accessibility.psu.edu/fontsizehtml/. ↵
- Liquid layout are layouts that are based on percentages of the current browser window's size. They flex with the size of the window, even if the current viewer changes their browser size as they're viewing the site. Liquid width layouts allow a very efficient use of the space provided by any given web browser window or screen resolution. ↵
