Typographic accessibility in more detail
The three pillars of accessibility - emotional, functional and technical - can be applied to any output whether that is a product or a service. Each industry and sector will have its own specific definitions relevant to their output. The following paragraphs describe each accessibility pillar in the context of typography and typefaces.
Using symbols that visualize language the purpose of writing is to communicate thought, across geography and time. Typography is a formalised and mechanised means of writing and still serves the purpose of transmitting an author’s thought to others without distraction to the reader. The typeface is the most basic element of typography defining the visual appearance of a font, the collection of glyphs. They are the very symbols that visualize language that may either represent the sound of a language or its concepts. The Latin alphabet or the Devanagari syllabary are examples of sound representation whereas Chinese symbols are an example of concept representation.
Emotional accessibility
When Gutenberg introduced printing with moveable type he cast several versions of each character to mimic the handwriting style, the calligraphy, that was used to write books at the time. His main concern was that readers would reject printed books if the letters were too consistent in appearance. By creating multiple versions of each glyph he provided emotional accessibility to potential readers who were used to seeing the irregular characters of hand written manuscripts..
In 1927 a study by Poffenberger & Francken established a direct emotional connection between type styles and subject matter, between type style and the emotional reaction the style evoked. We rarely notice when the choice of typeface is right for the subject matter but will strongly react when it isn’t as was illustrated when CERN chose Comic Sans to announce one of the most significant scientific discoveries in history.
The choice of typeface plays an important role to emotional accessibility; how the type is set is as important. Getting the typeface wrong may immediately turn the reader away from the content, however beautiful the setting and layout, and conversely, the most beautiful typeface cannot engage emotionally if the layout is wrong. Consider the newspaper: every day it has to attract the eye of the potential reader. It does so by deliberately employing typefaces and layout formatting, from large headlines, tightly set and bold, to the actual text giving a factual and calm impression engaging with us before we have even read a single word. When choosing the typeface today we often find that sans serif type styles with a constructed or geometric appearance are viewed as neutral, and in recent years have become synonymous with corporate branding blandness. Some serif type styles are perceived to be academic while others have an authoritative expression.
Blackletter — also known as Gothic type — has long been associated with the Third Reich and all its evils. This is not least because the rulers at the time declared this style, and many derivatives of it, the German type. Upon discovering that the Jewish community used Schwabacher, a subcategory of Blackletter, the German authorities declared it all Jewish type and immediately proceeded to adopt Roman style typefaces as their official typographic look. The younger generation today, born in the late 1990s and later no longer or only tentatively have that negative emotional connection. This generation uses Blackletter typography much more creatively and liberally to express different emotions.
Right: contemporary movie poster
Functional accessibility
It is not always easy to distinguish between functional and emotional accessibility since a functional deficiency can lead to emotional rejection before even a single word has been read. Yet there are some very clear definitions of what functional accessibility in typography constitutes. Legibility and readability are two clearly defined functional accessibility parameters that deal with the quick and correct identification of individual glyphs and with the smoothness by which paragraph can be read. The target audience plays an important factor in the typographic decision making. For example, over 50 year old people generally have a visual acuity of only about 20% of that of 20 year old people. That makes small type sizes, in a lighter style immediately less accessible, or even inaccessible at all. The older person literally cannot see it properly.
Sometimes the style of a typeface contains a lot of ambiguity between characters which makes it harder for the brain to decode individual glyphs (legibility), particularly at text sizes. Simply making text larger is not necessarily the answer as this may create other functional accessibility problems, so choosing a typeface with less ambiguity may alleviate ambiguity without the need of larger sizes or other graphic crutches to make content legible. It is also possible that the typeface cannot be changed for brand identity reasons. In such instances simple devices such as increasing letter spacing or, if the font family allows, an increased weight style may already alleviate accessibility issues.
Tight letter spacing is one of the most common functional accessibility hurdles in text sizes. Not only does it often elicit an emotional rejection but it also places a heavier burden on decoding characters due to visual crowding. One of the most obvious examples where visual crowding can become an actual barrier is the letter combination ‘r n’ which can easily be read as ‘m’. Some typefaces are designed with tighter letter spacing and they would benefit from a slight positive tracking but most, and in particular serif fonts, tend to have letter spacing that is designed for reading sizes. It has to be said here, that the larger the type is set, the tighter the letter spacing is required.
One area that is often overlooked, mostly through ignorance or thoughtlessness, is language support. This is a functional accessibility issue as much as technical, and can also create emotional acceptance or rejection. A word may use an accented character not present in the font, for a name for example, and that character is often substituted by another font with a stylistically different appearance. Or it may simply leave a ‘missing character box’ in the text. Not only does this disturb the look and feel of the text but it will create a readability bump. At the extreme end poor setting or poor choice of a font for more complex writing systems can create strong functional inaccessibility. Consider Arabic: it can be seen with typesetting that is made up of separated glyphs which is a complete functionality fail to the Arabic reader who expects the letters to join.
Technical accessibility
Linguistic support is also a considerable part of technical accessibility. The font must support the languages intended to be written, and the software used for setting the language must also be able to handle the sometimes very complex rendering of glyphs or glyph combinations. Too often, linguistic support is not considered at the beginning of a project which inevitably leads to a functional and technical accessibility failure.
There are many guidelines and legislative documents that deal with specifications for all sorts of typographic elements. Unfortunately, they are too simplistic at best, and outright poor or even wrong at worst. What it does allow is the ticking of accessibility boxes, irrespective of whether the result is emotionally or functionally accessible. Consider for a moment the stipulation that type should be specified at a minimum of 24px. This guideline in itself is a technical accessibility failure as it does not take into account the different height dimensions of typefaces depending on style. At 24px one font may perform perfectly fine, and may even be perceived large; yet another font at 24px will invite complaints that it is too small.
For print the typographer or graphic designer is largely in control of how the content will be presented to the audience. There may be a few minor parameters outside their control but nothing that would adversely affect typographic accessibility. Providing content that is both emotionally and functionally accessible in a digital environment is a near impossible task. The typographer or graphic designer has no or only limited control on how the typeface or layout is presented to the reader. Much of it depends on the platforms and programs that the reader uses, irrespective of how well a font meets the published technical specifications. Web browsers, for example, all tend to use their own interpretations of rasterizing software to convert font outlines into pixels. Sometimes, important data that the font developer included for better accessibility is ignored, or substituted by the browser. This inevitably leads to varying font behaviour depending on which browser content is displayed, and even which version of said browser.
The natural instinct would be to simply use a font that is installed on an operating system and then define fall-back font alternatives. On the surface that may tick the boxes, and appear like a solution but the reality is that emotional accessibility fails as the typeface no longer represents the look and feel the author or content creator intended. Functional accessibility may be compromised, too, by a poor choice of system font.
Words are important, how they are crafted into sentences and into messages. Poor typographic accessibility undermines typography’s primary purpose: to transmit thought from one person to another by means of symbols that visualize language, across both borders and time. It is impossible to achieve 100% accessibility, in any human undertaking, but it is possible, with careful consideration of the three components of accessibility to achieve optimum accessibility.
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