Text, Colour and Contrast
Text and fonts
Text and font choices, including style and size, are seemingly endless. Some choices lend themselves better to supporting accessibility than others. For example, avoid underlining and italics, as these can make letters and words run together making them harder to read. Use font size 12 or higher for body text in Microsoft Word documents or PDFs. BLOCK CAPITALS are also more difficult to interpret, so use lower case or sentence case.
In sentence case, lowercase most words in a title or heading. Capitalize only the following words:
- the first word of the title or heading
- the first word of a subtitle
- the first word after a colon, em dash, or end punctuation in a heading
- nouns followed by numerals or letters
- proper nouns (such as the names of racial or ethnic groups)
Colour
You can absolutely use colour to make your content visually interesting, but don’t solely rely on colour to convey meaning. Effective use of colour can help support students, however it is important to use additional means of conveying information in addition to colour (i.e. headings, lists, bold text).
Contrast
Be mindful of contrast when selecting colours to use. Yellow text on a white background is very difficult to read for most people, while red text on a green background would be difficult for someone with red-green colour blindness. Brown-orange and blue-purple colour combinations should also be avoided. Take a look at the text below.
Yellow text on a white background has very poor contrast.
Orange text on a brown background can be difficult to read.
Blue-purple colour combinations can also be tough to read.
If you are unsure about colours you have chosen, you can use this online Contrast Checker.
Attribution and References
Text, Colour and Contrast is a derivative of the following works: “Effective Use of Colour [New Tab]” by the University of Lincoln, used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and “Font size [New Tab]” by Coolidge, A., Doner, S., Robertson, T., & Gray, J., used under CC BY-4.0.
