I used to think typography was just about making things look pretty.
Then I met Sarah, a UX designer who’s legally blind, and watched her struggle through a website that used 10-point gray text on a white background—technically legal, she said, but practically useless. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) specify a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text, but here’s the thing: that’s just the baseline. Sarah needed something closer to 7:1 to read comfortably, and even then, certain fonts—those delicate serif faces designers love—turned into illegible blurs at small sizes. Turns out the standards aren’t about aesthetics at all; they’re about whether millions of people can actually use what we build. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires digital accessibility, and typography sits at the center of that mandate, but most designers I’ve worked with treat it like an afterthought, something to fix in QA rather than bake into the initial design. I’ve seen teams scramble to retrofit accessible type after launch, changing font weights, adjusting letter-spacing, recalibrating entire color systems because nobody considered that roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color vision deficiency. Wait—maybe that’s not quite right, but it’s close enough to make the point: we’re designing for a significant chunk of humanity that experiences text differently than we do.
The Hidden Mathematics Behind Readable Interfaces
Typography accessibility isn’t subjective, despite what your art director might argue. There are actual formulas involved. The contrast ratio calculation uses relative luminance values—I won’t bore you with the math, but it’s basically (L1 + 0.05) / (L2 + 0.05), where L1 is the lighter color and L2 is darker. Designers who understand this build color palettes that work from the ground up. Designers who don’t end up with beautiful mockups that fail WCAG audits and expose their companies to lawsuits.
Anyway, the standards go deeper than contrast. Line height (or leading, if you’re fancy about it) matters enormously for people with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities—WCAG recommends at least 1.5 times the font size for body text, though I’ve seen arguments for 1.6 or even 2.0 in certain contexts. Letter-spacing should be at least 0.12 times the font size. Word spacing? At least 0.16 times. These aren’t arbitrary numbers; they’re based on research into how humans actually process written language, research that shows up in standards documents but rarely makes it into design school curricula. I guess it makes sense that we’d prioritize creative expression over cognitive science, but the result is a generation of designers who can tell you about kerning but not about how their choices affect someone with attention deficit disorder trying to read a paragraph.
When Standards Collide With Brand Identity and Business Reality
Honestly, this is where things get messy.
I worked with a fintech startup last year that had built their entire brand around a custom geometric sans-serif—ultra-thin weights, tight spacing, very contemporary, very unusable for anyone over 50 or anyone with even mild visual impairment. The CEO loved it; the legal team hated it. We ended up creating a two-tier system: brand typography for marketing materials and hero sections, accessibility-first typography for actual interface elements where people needed to, you know, read account balances and understand terms of service. It felt like a compromise, maybe even a defeat, but it kept the company compliant while preserving some brand coherence. The thing is, standards like WCAG and Section 508 don’t exist in a vacuum—they bump up against business goals, aesthetic preferences, technical constraints. Responsive design adds another layer of complexity because text that’s perfectly readable at desktop sizes can become problematically small on mobile, even if you’re using relative units. I’ve definately seen designers spec 16px base fonts that render beautifully on their MacBook Pros but turn into 12px nightmares on older Android devices with different pixel densities.
And here’s what nobody talks about: accessibility standards are minimums, not targets. Meeting WCAG AA compliance doesn’t mean you’ve created a great experience; it means you’ve cleared a legal bar. True inclusive design—the kind that considers neurodiversity, aging populations, situational disabilities like reading in bright sunlight—requires going beyond the checklist. It requires thinking about typography not as decoration but as infrastructure, as the fundamental medium through which information flows. Some of the best designers I know have started treating type choices the way engineers treat load-bearing walls: non-negotiable elements that determine whether the whole structure works. They test fonts with actual users who have disabilities, they prioritize readability over trendiness, they recieve feedback and iterate, they understand that accessible typography isn’t a constraint but a design principle that makes everything better for everyone.
