Fonts, Text, and Readability

To facilitate reading text from across the room, it is important to ensure easy readability by choosing the right font face, size, and color.

Avoid using serif fonts. Serifs can enhance readability in print media, especially in body text, but they tend to lessen readability on displays. Sans-serif fonts such as Arial and Trebuchet are easier to read. If you must use a serif font (for example, in a logo), size it to at least 25 points.

All text should be sized to at least 28 points. Because screen space is limited and blocks of text in paragraph form are difficult to read at a distance, try to find economical ways to display text information, such as the following:

• Use lists of short phrases rather than paragraphs.
• Move larger blocks of text onto secondary pages.
• Edit text to remove any nonessential information.

Be sure that there is adequate contrast between text and its background, and use light and dark values to create contrast. The following illustrations are examples of good contrast.

The following illustration is an example of poor contrast:

Do not rely on differences in hue to provide contrast. For example, do not use a red and a blue of similar value. The following illustrations show the result of relying on differences in hue to provide contrast:

Avoid using background patterns behind text. The following illustration is an example of text that can be difficult to read because it appears over a background pattern:

Tips:

• Avoid long scrolling paragraphs and pages of text. If you must use them, put the text in a contained area that the user can shift focus to.
• All text should use a sans-serif font.
• Serif fonts are fine for large titles or graphic elements.
• Font sizes smaller than 20 points are generally unreadable on standard definition televisions.
• Create a type hierarchy and use only a few font sizes.

See Also

• Designing Applications for Windows Media Center