In the past choosing an accessible, readable font for your website wasn’t difficult, basically because you didn’t have many fonts to choose from. You were restricted to using ‘web safe’ fonts, i.e. those fonts that were likely to be installed on your visitors computers.

Lots of energy and creativity has been spent trying to get around this restriction – from automatically replacing text with images and flash/Javascript based solutions.

Using images instead of text has clear accessibility problems, as did the Flash/Javascript solutions (which tended to be buggy and difficult to implement).

None of these solutions was more than a sticking plaster on the basic problems that designers were not free to use the fonts they wanted to when designing a website.

One current solution is to ‘rent’ the fonts you want to appear on your site, i.e. a third party owns lots of nice fonts which you can use on your website; and when a visitor loads your web page your desired font is downloaded from that third-party site and used to display your content.

If the users browser doesn’t support this new font download solution – the fonts specified in the CSS are displayed; so what we have is a relatively easy to use, robust and accessible solution to the font problem. That is, as long as the designer has chosen fonts that look nice and are readable across the different platforms and browsers, i.e. not all fonts will look good on a low resolution computer screen.

It is a very simple solution, but it does have the drawback that you pay for the privilege. Business being business it’s not a case of a one off-payment; to continue to use the fonts you continue to pay for the on-going service of being able to download and use them.

The two main players are Typekit http://typekit.com (aquired by Adobe) and Font deck http://fontdeck.com/

Links

  • Jeffrey Zeldman: My Love/Hate Affair With Typekit: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/03/22/my-lovehate-affair-with-typekit/
  • Typekit
  • Font Deck

Related Content

  • Website Accessibility Auditing Service – for WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2 Compliance
    Richard Morton is a member of our website accessibility audit team "A large proportion of my work over the last six years has been web accessibility auditing, using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 & WCAG 2.2).I do manual testing, using the standard browsers, and light tools like the AIS ...
  • About Web Designer and Accessible Website Design Specialist Jim Byrne
    A passion for equality and accessibility Decades before he became an accessible website design specialist, Jim started his working life as a computer programmer in 1979 using 'miniframe' computers that had LP (a long player record) sized 'not very floppy disks'. The disks needed to be screwed into a large cabinet ...
  • Accessibility Auditing – WCAG 2.1 & WCAG 2.2 and Accessible Website Design, UK
    Jim Byrne is an accessibility specialist with three decades of experience in accessible website design, training and accessibility auditing and consultancy for the not-for-profit, education, public and third sector. An award-winning website developer, website accessibility training provider and WCAG 2 expert ( he provided feedback on the development of WCAG ...

Take my Web Accessibility Online Training Course - WCAG 2.1 Compliance

Learn to design and manage WCAG compliant, accessible websites with my online course

You will learn both the techniques of accessible website design and an entire ‘framework for thinking about the subject’. It will equip you with the skills to understand, identify and fix issues any accessibility issues you come across. Watch the free videos to get a taste of what is on the course. Video image from Web Accessibility Online Training Course - WCAG 2.1 Compliance

Working with non-profits, charities, voluntary and public sector organisations and social enterprises for over 20 years. Jim set up one of the worlds first website accessibility web agencies in the mid 1990s.