WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Font size and Italics in PDFs

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Oct 26, 2011 9:00PM

Dan,
As part of HHS, we don't have a recommended size, we only have
recommended font faces. Those are: Cambria, Calibri, Verdana, Arial,
Tahoma, Helvetica and Times New Roman. These fonts don't distort when
you zoom in on it, or reflow the PDF, as Andrew said.

> And is italicized text something that should only be done sparingly?
If italicized text is hard to read, try another font. Fancy fonts but
plain fonts, I think Georgia is one, can get hard to read in italic
and sometimes plain, this is due to all the little loop-de-loo's that
are added. These tend to make the characters bleed together.

> "be sure to use a large enough font size"-type of language
This allows people to use their judgement. Thinking about questions I
get at work, if we put something say use 14 point everywhere, somebody
will come back and say that makes us use ___ more pages a year, and we
need to be more green.

--
Ryan E. Benson



On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Andrew Kirkpatrick < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Dan,
> If you tag your PDFs properly, not only can users zoom in to increase the text size, but they can enable reflow of the text so the text wraps within the confines of the current window.  So, font size shouldn't be too small, but people reading the PDF can adjust it.
>
> Thanks,
> AWK
>
> Andrew Kirkpatrick
> Group Product Manager, Accessibility
> Adobe Systems
>
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> http://twitter.com/awkawk
> http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility
>
>
>