December 09, 2002

Typography

Here is a great article for anyone building web pages: Understanding web typography - an introduction. Jim Byrne covers text on the web in general, with a bent towards accessibility. An excerpt:

But - as with all heroes - text also has the potential to be a very bad; bad text is:

  • unable to be changed to suit the preferences of the end user
  • difficult to read due to font incompatibilites.
  • so small it is unreadable
  • inaccessible due to inadequate contrast between text and background or due to 'busy' backgrounds
  • presented in inpenetrable blocks that make it difficult to read
  • presented as an image - that can't be resized or read by people using screen readers.
  • difficult to read because it is moving or blinking.