Appearance

​​Instructions for understanding content and accomplishing tasks shouldn’t rely solely on characteristics like shape, color, size, visual location, orientation, or sound.

People with low vision use zoom to scale content, sometimes up to 400%. As they zoom, content should reflow vertically (as a column) and remain fully legible and logical without a need for horizontal scrolling.

Some users mount devices in a fixed orientation (e.g., on the arm of a wheelchair). Make sure your content doesn’t restrict its view and operation to a single display orientation, such as portrait or landscape, unless a specific display orientation is essential.

Sighted people perceive page structure and relationships through visual cues like headings, spacing, color, etc. Having these structures and relationships set or available in text make your site easier to understand for everyone.

Make sure touch controls like hamburger menus, social icons, gallery viewers, etc. are usable by a wide range of hand and stylus sizes. This doesn’t include footnotes or icons in or at the end of a sentence.

People with low vision sometimes resize text larger than the 16px default. When we set font sizes in absolute units, like px, the page doesn’t always respect the user’s preference and instead shows the text at the font-size authored.

Website content should be easy to scan and understand. Your page layout should make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for and do what they need to do. It’s also important to build your content programmatically, so assistive technologies can access content in the same order it is visually displayed.

We shouldn’t rely solely on color to convey information, indicate an action, or distinguish a visual element. This makes it impossible for people who are blind, visually impaired, or who don’t easily distinguish colors to access this information.

Designing text for readability and legibility are essential to a successful user experience. Appropriate text sizing and spacing ensure that visually-impaired people can read important text, and help those with cognitive disabilities to better focus on text blocks.