Choosing Fonts for Accessible Print Materials

Why accessible typography is worth the effort

Most print designers spend their time thinking about how a piece looks. The best ones also think about how it reads. Those two goals are not in conflict, but they do pull in different directions, and when time is short it is usually legibility that gets sacrificed. A poster that looks striking at A3 on a studio wall can be genuinely difficult to read at the bus stop in the rain, at arm's length, by someone who has forgotten their glasses.

Accessible print design is not niche. Around one in twelve people in the UK has some degree of colour vision deficiency, and a far larger number will at some point be reading your leaflet in poor light, at speed, or while distracted. Add in older readers, people reading in a second language, and anyone with a visual impairment, and you have a substantial slice of your audience. Making type easier to read benefits everyone, including the people who never think about it.

Choosing readable typefaces

Start with the letterforms themselves. The best typefaces for body copy share a handful of practical qualities:

• Large x-height. A generous x-height makes lowercase letters feel bigger at the same point size, which improves reading at a distance or in small print.
• Open apertures. Look at the gaps in letters like c, e, s and a. If they are nearly closed, the shapes blur together at small sizes.
• Distinguishable characters. Test whether you can tell apart capital I, lowercase l and the numeral 1, or capital O and zero. Many popular display faces fail this immediately.
• Clear, unfussy shapes. Decorative and script faces work for a headline, never for instructions, forms or timetables.

Well-tested sans-serif families are a safe starting point for signage, forms and public information, because their simple shapes survive reproduction and poor printing conditions. Serif faces can be perfectly accessible in body text, particularly in longer documents where the serifs help guide the eye along the line. Choose either, but choose a family with a proper range of weights and a true italic, and then use it consistently.

Be cautious with ultra-light weights, extra-condensed cuts and anything described as a display or headline face. They are designed to be noticed, not read at length.

Sizing type for comfortable reading

Point size is the most common place where good intentions slip. Twelve point is often treated as a sensible minimum for print body copy, but for materials aimed at older readers, or designed to be read standing up, or printed on cheap stock, treat 12pt as the floor rather than the target. Fourteen point is comfortable for most general leaflets, and large print documents usually start at 16pt and go up from there. Text intended to be read at a distance, such as a shop sign or a safety notice, needs far more generous sizing again.

Two other measures matter as much as point size. Leading, the space between lines, should sit at roughly 1.4 to 1.5 times the type size; tighter than that and the eye struggles to find the next line. Line length should land somewhere between 50 and 70 characters. Longer lines exhaust the reader, shorter ones break the rhythm of the sentence. If your line length and your leading are working together, most readers will not notice anything at all, which is exactly the point.

Contrast is doing more work than you think

Contrast is where print and screen design differ most, and where print designers get caught out. A helpful benchmark is the widely used 4.5:1 contrast ratio for body text, which gives a reasonable starting point even though it was written with screens in mind. In practice, on paper, that means black or very dark grey on white or a pale cream, or a deep navy on a light background.

Watch out for these common traps:

• Mid-tone greys, which look elegant on a monitor and washed out on paper.
• Coloured text on coloured backgrounds, particularly yellow on white or red on green.
• Reversed type, white on a dark solid, which fills in and thickens during printing. If you must reverse, use a slightly heavier weight and give the letters a little more space.
• Fine hairlines and thin rules, which vanish on textured or recycled stock.

Paper choice feeds into this directly. Matte and uncoated stocks scatter light and reduce glare, which helps a great deal, but they also soak up ink and soften edges. Gloss can look crisp but throws reflections that make reading uncomfortable under overhead lighting.

Layout details that quietly help

Alignment matters more than most people expect. Left-aligned text with a ragged right edge is easier to read than justified text, because it keeps even word spacing and avoids the rivers of white space that appear in narrow justified columns. Avoid long passages of capitals, which remove the word shapes readers rely on, and if you must use them for a heading, add a little letter-spacing.

Give your text room to breathe. Generous margins, clear space between columns and a firm distinction between headings and body copy all reduce the effort required to find your way around a page. Use bold for emphasis rather than underlining or italics, both of which disrupt the reading line. If your document has sections, make the hierarchy obvious through size and weight, not just colour.

Test before you print

Nothing replaces a real proof. Print a sample at final size on the actual stock, then look at it under a dull lamp and from a metre away. Ask someone who does not know the content to read a paragraph aloud and tell you where they stumbled. Check the smallest text on the page, the caption or the footnote, because that is usually where legibility fails first.

Then check the finished piece in the situation it will actually be used. A menu gets read in dim restaurant lighting. A form gets filled in at a counter, standing up, with a pen in one hand. A leaflet gets skimmed in ten seconds. Designing for those real conditions, rather than for a perfect screen, is what makes printed information genuinely useful to everyone who picks it up.