Page design
Making your page readable by everyone
Contrast, size, alt text: three fixes that take an hour and open your page to ten percent more of the audience.
Accessibility gets treated as a regulatory box to tick, when it's really a matter of audience: roughly one person in ten can't comfortably read a badly built page.
The three fixes that pay off
- Text contrast: aim for at least a 4.5-to-1 ratio. Light gray on white almost always fails.
- Alt text on images: describe what's actually shown, don't just repeat the title.
- A base size of at least 16 pixels, with no text locked into fixed pixels inside buttons.
The third line is the interesting one: half of all accessibility fixes make reading easier for everyone, under perfectly ordinary conditions.