Introduction
Your choice of fonts and styling play a key part in making your document easy to read and understand by all customers. There are several accessibility rules to be aware of when deciding on the design of your document.
Fonts and text sizing
Somerset Council branding asks for Atkinson Hyperlegible to be used for headings, and Arial for paragraph text. If you are unable to use Atkinson Hyperlegible please use Arial Bold as an alternative.
These fonts have been chosen because they are easy for those with dyslexia or sight impairments to read.
Text size
Use a text size of 12-point or higher for the body text, text that is too small or tightly spaced can be hard for a lot of users to read.
It is important to be aware that there are slightly different colour contrast rules to follow depending on whether your text is larger or smaller than 18pt, which we will explain in the ‘How to do it’ section below.
It is good practice to make ‘large print’ versions of documents available on request. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) define ‘large print’ as 16 to 18-point Arial for the body text, and ‘giant print’ as larger than 18-point. It is also important to remember that point sizes can vary between fonts.
For example:
- this is 12-point text in Arial
- this is 12-point text in Verdana
- this is 12-point text in Times New Roman
Why it matters
Colour blindness and vision impairments
There are many people who see colours differently, depending on the type of colour blindness they might have, and some who do not see colour at all. Subtle colour changes can be hard to distinguish, making the document difficult or impossible to read. It might look nice from a design point of view, but inaccessible design can easily exclude people from the information.
Dyslexia and neurological conditions
There are various conditions, including Dyslexia, which can cause text to appear as if it is moving or distorted to the reader. This can mean reading is tiring and frustrating, especially if it is a long document. Ensuring text is well-spaced and big enough can make a big difference to these customers.
Here are a few common experiences:
- Letters seem to shift or swap places
- Words appear to float or ripple
- Lines of text merge together or become hard to track
- Text may fade in and out or appear distorted
How to do it
Below are important rules to consider when producing an accessible document.
- Do not use all capitals, always use proper sentence case.
- Do not add text on top of a background image unless you have added a solid or suitably opaque background to the text area, with an appropriate colour contrast ratio between the text and background colour.
- High colour contrast between elements makes documents more readable:
- text above 18pt must have a colour contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background
- text below 18pt must have a colour contrast ratio of at least 7:1 against its background
- you might consider using black text on a light yellow background, as this can be beneficial to readers who are dyslexic or have a learning difficulty
- Do not use colour alone to convey meaning. If you want to use colour to distinguish text or data, you must also consider making the text bold or adding a symbol with a corresponding key, because not all readers can see colours.
- White space makes information easier to read, so do not overcrowd the page with text. Make sure you leave sufficient space between paragraphs, and consider increasing the space between lines.
- Do not use italics, instead large or bold text is useful for highlighting and emphasising.
- Numbers from one to nine are easier to read in normal text if they are written as words. Numbers from 10 upwards should be presented as numerals.
- Justifying text to the left makes it easier to find the start and end of each line and ensures an even gap between words.
- Do not hyphenate words to make them wrap onto the next line.