The most readable typefaces are unfussy, with open letterforms and shapes you can tell apart — the capital I, lowercase l and digit 1 should not collapse into one stick. Avoid long runs of ALL CAPS, italics and underlines in body text; they strip away the word-shape cues we read by. Left-align text rather than justifying it, which opens uneven “rivers” of whitespace.
What the guidelines require
- Resize text (WCAG 1.4.4, AA) — text must scale to 200% without losing content or breaking the layout. Aequitas is built in relative units so it does.
- Text spacing (WCAG 1.4.12, AA) — content must survive line height of 1.5×, paragraph spacing of 2×, letter-spacing 0.12× and word-spacing 0.16× the font size.
- Comfortable defaults — body text around 16–19px, line spacing ~1.5, and lines of roughly 60–70 characters; lines that are too long tire the reader.
The pairing used here
Aequitas pairs Merriweather — a sturdy serif whose open shapes read well large — for headings, with Josefin Sans, a clean geometric sans, for body and interface text. The contrast between them makes hierarchy obvious at a glance while keeping the page coherent.
A note on “dyslexia fonts”
Special fonts like OpenDyslexic are popular, but the evidence is underwhelming: a 2017 study and a 2020 systematic review found no improvement in reading speed or accuracy over ordinary fonts such as Arial. What actually helps dyslexic readers — a plain, well-spaced typeface at a generous size with short lines — is simply good typography, and it helps everyone. So that is what we did, rather than reaching for a “magic” font.
Sources: British Dyslexia Association Style Guide (2023); W3C WCAG 2.2 Understanding docs (SC 1.4.4, 1.4.12); Kuster et al. (2020); Rello & Baeza-Yates research summaries.