Typography, Readability and Digital Accessibility  🔗 **Source:** [Typography, Readability and Digital Accessibility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [typography, readability, web-accessibility, wcag, dyslexia-myths] > author: Giulia Laco > source: WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 (WPA11yDay) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes > date created: 2026-09-08 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: Typography, Readability and Digital Accessibility > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum)](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html) > - [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.4 Resize Text](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/resize-text.html) > - [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 3.1.1 Language of Page](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/language-of-page.html) > - [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 3.1.5 Reading Level](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/reading-level.html) > - [If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_traveler) > ## 📝 Summary > - Giulia Laco, an Italian web designer/developer working since the mid-90s and now a CSS, web typography, and semantic HTML consultant/trainer, gave this session at WordPress Accessibility Day 2025, introduced by emcee Jessica Sams. > - She builds a three-part model — visibility, legibility, readability — and ties each to a specific mechanical or WCAG cause: contrast and font size (visibility), letterform anatomy and spacing (legibility), and layout/typeset craft (readability). > - Key stakeholders: WordPress theme and plugin designers, front-end developers who set `font-size`, accessibility auditors, and readers with low vision, dyslexia, or other neurodivergences who depend on browser-level text resizing. > - The central risk she flags is fixed-unit (`px`) font sizing: it silently blocks a user's browser font-size preference, which she treats as a bigger practical failure than any single typeface choice. > - Bottom line: accessible typography is a chain of specific, checkable decisions — contrast ratio, relative units, aperture width, letter spacing, line length, and paragraph balance — not a vague design instinct. > ## 📖 Main Content > Laco frames "visual reading" as an active, physical-then-mental process and walks through it in the order the eye and brain actually perform it, before mapping the results onto WCAG language. > Physically, the eye doesn't scan text smoothly. It alternates **fixations** (pauses of roughly a quarter-second on a cluster of letters) and **saccades** (fast jumps between fixations), moving both across a line and down to the next one, with **regressions** — backward re-reads — when comprehension falters. Each fixation is sharp only at its center (**foveal acuity**, named for the fovea, the retina's highest-density light-receptor zone) and blurs outward. She cites typographer Bruno Maag's estimate that a fixation captures 7–9 characters. She then cites a diagram by reading researcher Sofie Beier showing letter recognition and word recognition running in parallel — her explanation for why lowercase text reads faster than all caps: readers pattern-match whole word shapes, not letter-by-letter. > She layers in Zuzana Licko's theory of typeface exposure — "Readers read best what they read most" — demonstrating it by setting the same sentence in Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond, Verdana, and Montserrat (all easy), then in Totally Gothic (illegible to most, because it's unfamiliar, not because it's objectively worse). > From there she defines three terms with distinct questions: **visibility** ("can you see it?" — contrast and font size, WCAG 1.4.3/1.4.6 and the large-text carve-out), **legibility** ("can you read it?" — letterform anatomy: apertures, kerning vs. letter-spacing, confusable character pairs like 0/O, rn/m, b/d/p/q), and **readability** ("can you comfortably read this?" — split into content readability, governed by WCAG 3.1.1 Language of Page and 3.1.5 Reading Level, and typographic readability, governed by alignment, line length, and paragraph balance). > Practical guidance follows directly from the model: left-align (predictable line starts), hyphenate justified text to avoid "rivers," keep measure near Bringhurst's 66-character ideal (45–75 range), balance character size/line height/line length together (Matej Latin's equilateral-triangle metaphor, Richard Rutter's three-legged-stool metaphor), and — repeated twice, once in the talk and once in Q&A — never set `font-size` in fixed units, because it blocks the browser-level resize path that WCAG 1.4.4 depends on. > ### 🗒️ Notes > #### ⏱️ [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=0s) Sponsors and introduction > - WordPress Accessibility Day 2025. Platinum sponsors named: Gravity Forms, WP Engine, Woo. Gold sponsors include Ally Web Accessibility, Equalize Digital, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks, Yoast. > #### ⏱️ [00:01:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=93s) Jessica Sams introduces Giulia Laco > - Emcee Jessica Sams (virtual public engagement specialist / UX designer, SWCA Environmental Consultants) introduces the session. > - Bio: background in humanities, logic, and linguistics; consultant/trainer; expertise in semantic HTML, SEO, UX, web typography, web fonts, CSS. > #### ⏱️ [00:03:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=180s) Giulia's opening > - Greets the audience from Italy; thanks the WordPress Accessibility Day team for the 24-hour event. > #### ⏱️ [00:04:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=265s) "The web was born accessible" > - Web designer/developer since the mid-90s. States the core principles the web was built on remain valid today, and calls the web "born accessible." > - Also works as a consultant and trainer on CSS, web typography, web fonts, semantic HTML. > #### ⏱️ [00:05:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=305s) Defining visual reading > - Reading is one modality among several (Braille via touch, screen readers via hearing); visual reading is the session's focus. > - Defines it as active engagement — extracting meaning from text, not passive scanning. > #### ⏱️ [00:06:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=386s) Calvino's opening lines as a reading-experience example > - Reads the opening of Italo Calvino's *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler* (trans. William Weaver): "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." > - Uses it to argue that reading requires a deliberate physical and mental state, not just visual input. > #### ⏱️ [00:08:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=496s) Three factor categories > - Organizes the influences on visual reading into common factors, personal conditions, and typographic properties. > #### ⏱️ [00:08:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=520s) Common factors in reading > - Situational: reading distance, paper vs. screen, ambient light, screen brightness, environment noise. > - Attitudinal: mental focus, mood, and the type of text (title, long-form, a menu voice label). > #### ⏱️ [00:09:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTd9UcH1Zes&t=572s) Personal conditions > - Age, reading proficiency, first vs. second language competence, interest and motivation. > - Visual impairments and neurodivergences named explicitly: memory issues, dyslexia, ADHD, ASD, epilepsy, migraine, anxiety, fatigue. > #### ⏱️ [ (Announcer) Thank you to our sponsors. Platinum Sponsor: Gravity Forms. Build accessible, powerful WordPress forms with Gravity Forms. Flexible tools for creators, developers, and teams of all sizes. Platinum Sponsor: WP Engine. WP Engine provides the most relied-upon and trusted WordPress products for businesses, brands, and agencies of all sizes. Platinum Sponsor: Woo. WooCommerce is the open-source e-commerce platform built on WordPress, helping merchants worldwide sell, manage, and grow their businesses. Gold sponsors: Ally Web Accessibility, Equalize Digital: websites for everyone, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks Web Hosting, Yoast. Silver sponsors: AAArdvark, CodeGeek – Your Vision. Our Talent, One Team, Kinetic Iris, Kinsta, Pressable, Second Melody. Bronze sponsors: 9 Planets Hosting, Engage, Draw Attention, Multidots, NerdPress, Osom Studio, OZeWAI – Australian Web Accessibility Initiative, Progress Planner, QualityLogic, Sharp, Simply Schedule Appointments, SiteGround, StellarWP, Termageddon, WebYes. (Jessica Sams) Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Day 2025. My name is Jessica Sams. I'm a virtual public engagement specialist and UX Designer for SWCA Environmental Consultants. Thank you for joining us. For Typography, Readability, and Digital Accessibility with Giulia Laco. Hooked on web design since the early days, she comes from a background in the humanities, logic, and linguistics. In her career, Giulia has crafted digital experiences for businesses, professionals, and e-commerce sites with optimization in mind. Her expertise spans semantic HTML, SEO, UX, and beyond. She's passionate about how typography shapes the web, digging into web font choices, and CSS, and readability. She works as a consultant and trainer for specialized courses and occasionally takes the stage at industry events. She's drawn to where disciplines meet and loves switching between theory and hands-on practice. You may add your questions using the Zoom's Q&A button anytime, and we'll answer them at the end of the presentation and use the chat button to connect with other attendees. (Giulia Laco) Hello, everyone. Greetings from Italy. Welcome to my session. Okay. Now, I'm really happy and proud to be part of this 24-hour event. I would like to thank WordPress Accessibility Day team to organize this event and having me talk about one of my favorite topics, that's web typography, readability, and digital accessibility. There are many intersections between the three, and that's exactly what we are going to explore today, if you're patient enough to follow me through. A few words about me. Well, I'm a web designer and developer who started out in the mid-90s at the very beginning of the web. Over the years, I've seen quite a lot of evolution, and I think it's still valid what was meant at the beginning. The core principles the web was built on remain valid today. The web was born accessible, and that was a brilliant idea. On top of being a web designer and developer during these, I'm also a consultant now and trainer on the main topics I know, at least, CSS, web typography, web fonts, semantic HTML, and the like. Let's dig into the topic of today. I start with how reading works. Well, in particular, I will focus on visual reading. What is visual reading? Well, it's a process of engaging with the written text in order to grasp some meanings and information from the text. Maybe visual reading is not the only form of reading. Some people, for instance, may use the sense of touch and read some Braille text, or some other can access content with a screen reader, so through the sense of hearing. What is peculiar about reading, in my opinion, is the active engagement we put into grasping information, extracting meaning from a piece of text. I've prepared a list of the main factors that, in my opinion, influence visual reading. Before starting this overview, well, talking about the reading experience, what could be better than a novel? I've picked one of Italo Calvino's latest novels, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Italo Calvino was an Italian writer whose works have been translated into many languages. Here are some random book covers. I would like to read you a few opening lines in the translation by William Weaver, because I think it's relevant to the topic. It begins like this. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Can you hear it? It's quite an exact language the author is using to describe the right moment, the exact moment in which one starts reading and says relax. It means a physical condition. Concentrate, something you have to do in the mind. Dispel every other thought, push away other thoughts, and then let the world around you fade. Let the world around you go into, let's say, out of focus. Blur it. Blur it. That's exactly what happens while reading. In my list of factors that influence visual reading, I've organized the items in three main areas. Let's say we have common factors, common to everybody, we have personal conditions because everybody is different, and typographic properties that link to the text, the text we are going to read. Among the common factors, I would say there are, are connected to the situation, such as the reading distance or the reading support. Is it on paper or is it on screen? The light, the ambient lighting, and if it's digital, the screen brightness, or the noise, the environment noise. There are some other factors that are linked to the reader's attitude, such as mental focus, even mood. Of course, the type of text we are going to read is relevant. Is it a title, a long form reading, a voice in a menu? Among personal conditions, well, the first of all, in my opinion, is age, because everybody has an age, whether it's a child who is learning to read or an adult getting older and progressively decreasing his or her abilities. Then we have competence in reading is relevant. The more I have read, the more proficient I have become. The same goes for the language competence. Is it my first language, second language? That's different. The interest in the topic I'm reading is also relevant, and the motivation I have. Then, of course, visual impairments, there are so many, so different memory issues, dyslexia, ADHD, ASD, epilepsy, neurodivergences, and even migraine, anxiety, fatigue, and maybe some more. In the third group, I put the typographic properties of the text. They influence reading. The first of the list, of course, is the typeface in which the text is written. I think it's the most important. Then we have the color contrast of the text over the background. Then the style of the font. Is it bold? Is it italic? The font dimension, of course, and the paragraph length, and spaces, spaces between lines, between characters, between words. Even the character width is important. Some others, and last but not least, I would say rhythm that I suspect is very relevant to fluency in reading. Let's look at the characteristics of visual reading. I'll give you a general idea of what visual science seems to be telling us, as far as I've understood. Please forgive my language, maybe. That might not be so much scientific, but let's have a look of the process. Let's say we start with fixations. What are fixations? Like pauses between eye movements, the fixation goes on a bunch of letters in a line of text, and it tends to last, I don't know, a quarter of a second. And then a second, a very quick movement, eye movement happens, and then another fixation over a bunch of other letters. We don't properly read each letter. We jump. This happens on a horizontal direction in our writing system, but also in a vertical direction. We need to focus on the current line of text, and maybe put the other lines out of focus. We alternate fixations and saccades on the first line. When we reach the end of a line, we perform a return movement to the beginning of the next line, if we find the exact place where the next line starts. It's common experience for visual readers that anytime we are in doubt about not having read properly, we go back to re-read previously encountered text, and that's called regression. The fixation, each fixation, has a maximum acuity in the center, and the letters around that point appear progressively blurred. We said foveal acuity. Fovea comes from fovea, which contains the highest concentration of light receptors. Fovea is the tiny central part of macula. Both are the center of the retina, the light-sensitive layer at the rear part, at the back part of the eye, that captures light and sends information of what it has captured to the brain. Then we have this focus mechanism. The eye works like a camera that can change focus from near objects to far objects. And what fascinates me about this is that it involves intentionality, so we intentionally focus on something interesting. The fovea collects an image, maybe an inverted image because of how lenses work, and maybe it's not one character per fixation, but a bunch of characters, the number of which depends on the reading distance and on the font size. A well-known typographer, Bruno Maag, has made a lot of calculations on this. The ideal number of characters in a fixation are from seven to nine, according to him. That's a very brilliant calculation. Let's continue to understand the process of visual reading. After the physical part, we go through some mental processes. Those data are sent to the brain. What happens there, I'm not so sure about, but I'll show you this diagram by Sofie Beier, a real expert on how reading works. It's very complex to study and to describe, but what I'd like to stress and what catches my attention is that it shows a parallel process of letter recognition and word recognition. As long as we try to detect letters, we use our knowledge about word to speed up the process and determine which word is most probable. And this, that's amazing, this may explain why lowercase text is easier to read than all caps. This is because we memorize, maybe, we memorize the shape of words, like ideograms. We perform some sort of shape recognition when we read, and this speeds up our reading. Another interesting thing about mental processing while reading is this, in my opinion, the typeface exposure. Well, that's a theory by Zuzana Licko, a famous type designer that once said, or wrote, "Readers read best what they read most." Let's see if it's true. This is set in Helvetica, quite common. This is in Georgia, common as well. In Garamond, like most books are written. In Verdana, like the first web, or Montserrat, the web of today. Wait a minute, what is this? This is quite illegible, isn't it? That's totally gothic. The exact typeface used by Zuzana Licko in her original quote to prove her point. It's not so common. It's not so easy to read because it's not so common. We haven't read it enough. This brings us to dig more into some concepts, the concepts of legibility and readability. They have some shades of meaning that I will explain later on. First, let's take a step back and consider the concept of visibility, because if we don't see, we can't visually read. Visibility, let's say, is the ease of seeing, of perceiving the text. It might answer us to the question, can you see it? Can you see? It's based on two pillars, color contrast and font size. Color contrast of text, the background. Let's make an example. Black text on white is high contrast text, and pale gray and white is a low contrast, not visible, not distinguishable text from background. This inevitably reminds us of the success criteria of color contrast in the WCAG, the guideline of distinguishable, that says that we have some recommended contrast ratio. The nice thing here, in my opinion, is that this contrast ratio is put in relation to the font size and the boldness of the font. We, as designers, we need to know where we can use a wider range of contrast ratio, a wider range of colors, so we should know what large-scale text is. From the definition in the WCAG, there are some other things interesting, in my opinion, and that's this. The note number one in that definition, that says fonts with extraordinarily thin strokes or unusual features and characteristics that reduce the familiarity of their letter forms are harder to read, especially at lower contrast levels. I made some examples. I took Broadway, a high-contrast web font, meaning that it has very thin strokes compared to very large strokes. The very thin strokes are not quite visible when the font is set small and on a lower contrast, pale gray and white. The same happens with unusual fonts, fonts that have unusual features and characteristics that reduce the familiarity of the letter forms. Remember Zuzana Licko. I compared those two examples of Broadway, totally gothic with Verdana, that was built to be readable on screens, and so you might see the difference and judge. The nice thing of this from the large text definition, is that color contrast in relation with font size, font weight, boldness, very thin strokes and unfamiliar letter forms. What about the font size, the second pillar of visibility? Well, can we trust font size? Not entirely, because if you set two different fonts at the same size, the same nominal size, let's say 16 pixels, you end up with very different perceptions. Fonts are different in size, in perceived size. That's because of history, it's a legacy from the metatype era. With regards to accessibility, this makes harder to define a clear boundary between normal and large text, because we don't have a proper nominal size. We have to judge, the designer's eye must have the last word on this, not the numbers. Talking about font size, I will quote another success criteria from the WCAG, the 1.4.4, the resize text one, that says that text should be set in a way that it could be resized up to 200% without loss of content or functionality. The interesting thing here is that this view must be seen in relation with the user agent accessibility guideline, so the one thought for browsers and-- Let's see, what does this mean in practice? Nowadays, there are at least two ways to zoom the text on a web page. Zooming from the view menu, or hitting control plus, command plus, and making — zooming — making text zoom by browser preferences, setting the character dimension, generally among a few predefined choices. These two methods of zooming are very different. What happens under the box, under the surface, is that the first one changes the reference pixel of-- It's something that happens in the device, whereas the second one changes the size of the root font, and that's upon our responsibilities as web developers. Just a warning, setting font size in pixels blocks user preferences, so never use fixed units for font size. Trust the device, the information in the device, the default of the device, and as a web developer, don't be mean and just don't block users from using their own browser settings or extensions. Don't use fixed units for fonts. Okay, now we go to, after visibility, we'll talk about legibility. Legibility is an English word that comes from Latin, from lego, legere, that means reading. It's generally addressed in typography as a bit different from readability, and it's meant to mean ease of deciphering, decoding the letters. Can you read it? Can you read this text? That's the question it answered. When we start looking to type legibility, in my opinion, it's important to get familiar with some basic typographic terms. Knowing the anatomy of type help us notice the subtle details in each typeface and evaluate how legible it is. For example, we should understand what a serif is, what an axis is, what an aperture, the baseline, the x-height of a typeface, or the descendant, the ascendant, the font size, the nominal font size, that it's different, that it'll be so, from the perceived font size, the visible height, and so on. I will talk in particular about apertures. What are apertures? Are the open and closed paths of letters. For example, in lowercase c or lowercase e, we have this opening of the circle, and if it's short, if it's narrow, when the font is typed small, it can be taken for an O, so that typeface with narrow apertures is going to be less legible, for example, for body type, when set small. That's correct, not every font has the same apertures, and so not every font has the same legibility. On top of apertures, I will talk about the distance between letters. I'm not referring to kerning, that's something backed into the font file, but I'm talking about what we call in CSS the letter spacing. I have a little challenge for you now. I've studied a series of repeated words with a very tiny spacing between letters. Can somebody spot my little joke? Well, here it is. I played with ambiguous characters. In one of the repetitions, instead of uppercase S, I put a number five. They're very similar in this typeface. Instead of a lowercase d, I put a lowercase c and an l, that combine, might resemble a D, but this is happening when the font is typed very narrow, each letter is very narrow to the other. If I add spacing between letters, that's going to be different, so spacing between letters matters a lot. Of course, this deceivable couple of pairs are not in every font. Some fonts have more ambiguous shapes than others, with this respect. We have a lot of confusable characters, ambiguous shapes, ambiguous proportions, and, as we saw, deceptive combinations. These pairs are like this, for example, number zero versus uppercase O, or number nine versus lowercase g. In the word 1Illinois, the first letters, they look quite the same in some fonts, or kerning sometimes can be seen as keming, because of rn resembling to an m. Then we have confusable pairs, mirror pairs, and rotational pairs. Lowercase b, d, p, q in sans serif fonts, well, it's quite common for them to have basically the same shape, mirrored or rotated, so they might be difficult to distinguish for some people. It's often said it's difficult for some people with dyslexia. It's certainly true for kids who start writing, that they mirror letters quite often. This thing doesn't happen so frequently with serif fonts, but it might happen as well, so choose responsibly. Another thing important in reading, in my opinion, is rhythm. Okay, we said distance between letters and rhythm between letters. Let's take the word minimum in lowercase. It shows a rhythmic pattern created by the vertical strokes of the letters and alternating openings between them. Some studies seem to demonstrate that regularism can help some people read, and irregularism seems to help some others. In any case, rhythm is relevant. We need some more research on that. Then, we finally arrive to the concept of readability. Well, what is readability, different from legibility? Readability, in my opinion, is something that I call reading experience, and it belongs to the wider area of user experience, but let's recap. With invisibility, the ease of seeing, answer to the question, can you see this? Whereas legibility, ease of deciphering, answer to the question, can you read this? Can you recognize the letters in it? Readability is the real ease of reading, and answer to the question, can you comfortably read this? Not only read this, but can you comfortably do? Let's dig into readability. Readability has two meanings. One is relative to the content. The content readability is linked to the language. Can you understand what I'm saying? Is it in the language you can understand, the concept you can understand, the level you can understand? The other kind of readability that I'm very fond of is typographic readability. That's quite inviting the reader to read. That's why I like it so much. Content readability has two nice WCAG success criteria linked to it. One is the 3.1.1 language of page, must be said, and the other one is the reading level. They deal with content readability. Speaking of typographic readability, well, the history of graphic has a lot of ads, and typographical ads for readability surely layout relations between elements, white space, hierarchies, and with everything that gives hierarchy and reading priority helps in typographic readability. Typographic scale gives also a harmonious way to present hierarchies, so we have a lot of tools. Of course, typesetting. Let's see some basic use of typesettings. The first that everybody knows are text alignments. We have left, center, and right possibility to align the text. The left one, in our writing system, is the best one. Why is it? Because it's easier to read when we go to the second line, the next line. We know where it is. We don't have to look for the starting of the second line or the next line somewhere. That's why the left alignment is the best for readability. Another thing, another alignment is the justification, the justified text. Typographers are very disappointed about narrow columns with justified because it happens that there are some spaces, uneven spaces in the text. They call them rivers. If you justify text, please use hyphenation. Now, it's possible also on the web, hyphenation. Not so, so, so good, but it's possible, so please, if you justify text in a short column, please hyphenate your text. Talking about length, line length, well, in the paragraph entitled choose a comfortable measure, measure is the line length in typography, Robert Bringer in his famous manual, the elements of typographic style writes, "The 66-character line is widely regarded as ideal," well, at some conditions, and, "Anything from 45 to 75 characters would do," and so on. Nevertheless, apart from the proper numbers, we all agree that there must be a limit, a min-max limit of the line length. Another concept here, the perfect paragraph readability. When we talk about paragraph length, paragraph width, we have to put that variable in relation with character size and line height, always, because if you adjust one, you have to adjust the other two, always. That's well said by two designers that I'd like to quote. One is Matej Latin with his metaphor of the equilateral triangle of perfect paragraphs. The other one is Richard Rutter with his metaphor of a three-legged stool for readability. They have the same three variables I mentioned before, and you have to balance the three variables in order to reach the perfect paragraph readability. Very interesting. Try it. Then fonts, how to choose them, how to use them? Well, technology is mature for proper typography. We have better screens, better font rendering, advanced technologies like variable fonts, OpenType, amazing new CSS properties already well supported by browsers, and more. We are ready for proper typography. How to choose the fonts? Well, please study the technical characteristics of each, choose them based on their function, choose fonts that match the message, of course, and test them in the context, in the language you're using. Perhaps consider the variable ones. They are a very new and impressive technology. I'll give you just two lines for my favorite axes. If you find a variable font with a great axis, take it, because it's very useful in web design. It gives small weight without reflow, very useful for hover or for dark mode, for very, very slight optic corrections. On the other hand, you can use optical size axis in a font that's magic. It means that it has different shapes of letters according to the intended font size. That's pure magic brought to you and to your project by the type designer. Inside the font file, magic, magic, magic, and that will help us bring back to the traditional typography. Digital typography will finally be able to shine again, as in the old times of print, of movable type, when character shapes were perfectly crafted for the intended size usage, and that will make a lot of difference. Enjoy your typesetting, and thank you. Please keep in touch and let me find you somewhere on the web, both on my personal website or at one of my agencies, or on LinkedIn, maybe. Thank you. Bye-bye. (Jessica) Hi. I'm your emcee, Jessica. Giulia, I invite you to enable your camera and we can go over some question and answer session. There you are. (Giulia Laco) Hello. (Jessica) I can hear you. All right, Giulia. Wonderful presentation. I really want to congratulate you on putting together such a comprehensive review over readability and legibility. Your audience wants to know. I believe your audience is looking for clarity on something that you said early in the presentation. You said don't use fixed units for fonts. Do you have a preference for the relative unit that is best to use? (Giulia) What is better not to use is pixels or fixed units because people can't rewrite as they like. I've shown two ways to zoom the text on the web. There are at least two. One is by doing a zoom like when you hit control-plus or command-plus, then you have something. It's a real zoom. Whereas if you, a user which would like to have to read in a bigger font, generally enables it on the browser, so on the preferences, and if you test your site with that different kind of sizes in the preferences, you'll end up discovering that if you're using font fixed units, either pixels, points, or any fixed unit, the user won't be able to resize it. That's why you don't have to use it. Just don't touch it. It's upon the device you use it. Then you take for granted what the body text is meant in that device. Then you use REM or whatever you like. (Jessica) I've seen mention of about three-type fonts in the chat and Q&A. People are asking about your opinion on OpenDyslexic for dyslexia. Also, Comic Sans as it relates to dyslexia, and then script fonts in the wedding industry and such like that. Could you please comment? (Giulia) OpenDyslexia or Comic Sans or the fonts that are said to be special for people with dyslexia, they're not scientific evidence of that, especially because it's said that dyslexia is not so much about the typeface you're reading, but it's about the sound you're hearing and the way you connect what you see and what you hear in your mind. The research has to be broader on that respect. It might be that some people are acquainted, they read a lot in that typeface, so they are proficient. We read best what we read most. That might be useful for some people using one of those fonts, special fonts. I, of course, recommend them for users, not for designers. You have to put your typeface that represents your brand on the website and your user will choose for long-form reading to overwrite it if they read it better. I believe so. (Jessica) Thank you. I am at times. Hi, Joe. I'm sorry I could not get to everybody's questions in the Q&A. Please reach out to Giulia on her social media. Did you have something to say, Joe? Joe Dolson: No. I was just letting you know that you're at time and we have to sign off expeditiously. (Jessica) Well then, I will leave you with our closing script. Thanks for attending the session with Giulia Laco. You can continue the conversation in chat or over on social media using hashtags, #wpa11yday and #wpad2025. We'd appreciate it if you go to 2025.wpaccessibility.day/feedback to provide anonymous feedback for our speakers on their presentation. You can enter to win a T-shirt while you're there. Coming up next in the next session, stay tuned for Reality Check: Building Accessibility That Works in the Global South with Yiga at 1800 UTC. While you're waiting, don't forget to visit our sponsors' pages and grab virtual swag and enter for a chance to win great prizes. See you in the next session., Typography, Readability and Digital Accessibility, Giulia Laco, 01m21cy48jywjc511ha1tvh9pp.