Tom-ah-toe, Toe-may-toe
Call them Fonts or call them Typefaces I’m not precious, but these along with the way we apply Formatting to our text make a massive difference to our Accessibility goals. Welcome to the A to Z of Accessibility: Power Platform Edition where this time around I am asking “What the F…ont?!?”
This applies to Power App, Power Pages, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents, as well as to any documentation or Azure DevOps Wiki / GitHub pages we produce.
What the F…ont?
The art of calligraphy has seen a resurgence in the last decade or so, and I’m all for it. I love watching and seeing the results of hand-crafted lettering that is artwork in its own right. When I look at the beautiful artwork created in some of the amazing historical tomes it leaves me in awe.
This trend also spawned a whole trend of “handwritten” fonts to appear on websites, documentation, emails and more. The issue with this is that these can often be difficult to read and decipher. If a person is dyslexic or has vision issues, this is a big problem. I’m not dyslexic but I can end up squinting at text trying to work out what it says.
I have even seen a website in the past that used a scrawly handwriting font for the whole site. I ended up using immersive reader to try to remove that challenge and make it so I could enjoy the content. And, yes, Immersive reader is often the tool that helps with this when it comes to websites, but should people really need to escape from the prettily crafted website in order to read what the author is writing?
A font can make or break a design, it can also make or break the overall accessibility of your app/report/portal/document/whatever. Unfortunately, I am yet to find any tools that can test this and so this is a definite one for the prime rule of accessibility – “Not About Us Without Us!”
See who uses accessibility tools in your network, get to know them, ask for help from the community!
As a quick recommendation – keep fonts simple but effective. Use decorative fonts sparingly and ensure that any message they convey is available in a clear way. Sans Serif fonts are often the best, but make sure that the formatting doesn’t make it hard to read. This isn’t a campaign to kill fancy fonts, but just an ask to consider where they are used. The upside of this is that it makes the artistic typeface stand out more and gives it more impact on the page!
Which leads me on to Formatting
Choosing the right font is only half of the story. If the formatting is all over the place, and not coherent, then it’s not going to help anybody!
Let’s start with the use of Headings. If you’re writing a document then you have Heading 1,2,3 etc. Those writing portals or web content have the all too familiar <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. What you may not realise is that, apart from making a table of contents easier, these are crucial elements for accessibility.
Screen readers in particular make use of the heading styles to know where page elements are and how to process information. Keyboard navigation can also make use of this in knowing, sometimes, where to jump to etc.
Part of the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines, particularly the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) tags etc, require the correct use of Headings tags in web content. This means that pages should have H1,2,3 used in order and in a correct way. Head on over to the W3C site by clicking here and take a look at the guidelines.
Testing times
Testing for this is very simple with Power Pages and general websites (blogs etc) as there are a number of tools available. Here’s a quick list of some that I find useful:
- Edge / Chrome Developer Tools. Press F12 and enable Developer Tools to get access to some accessibility reporting. Find out more on the Microsoft Learn page by clicking here.
- Accessibility Insights for Web as the Accessibility Insights website from Microsoft
- WAVE Edge / Chrome Extension at the Web Accessibility In Mind website
Thanks for reading the A to Z a11y – What the F…ont
Thank you for reading What the F…ont. This post is part of my [A to Z a11y] series the “A to Z Accessibility: Power Platform Edition”. Click here to go to the introduction article where I will be posting a Table of Contents, or simply check out the Accessibility section of the website from the top menu or by going directly to the category page here.
Content in this series is ©Mike Hartley. I am happy for folks to quote or reuse snippets (with attribution), but this has taken a lot of work to compile so please do not copy whole sections. If there are any corrections or suggestions, then please use my social links to contact me. I am always happy to add additional content and remarks with full credit given. Likewise, these pages will evolve as my learning and understanding grows, so make sure to keep this bookmarked.