In the past choosing readable, accessible fonts 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.…

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.