WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: 508 Fonts

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 10, 2009 1:45PM

Elizabeth J. Pyatt wrote:

> There are a lot of user preferences,

and the important thing is that authors should not try too hard to override
user preferences, which can depend on different people's different
abilities, not just esthetic views.

> but I think one recommendation
> is to ensure that the "x-height" (roughly the height of a lower-case
> letter)and is not too small. You also want to ensure that characters
> are not too thin.

That's far too simplistic. In particular, favoring large x-height (which is
_not_ the height of a lower-case letter, even roughly - it is specifically
the height of _some_ lower case letters, namely those without ascenders and
descenders) typically leads to using Verdana, which is a poor choice since
it magically makes authors to set font size to something small.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/