Designing for low-vision readers

Most accessibility advice about typography stops at "use 16px and good contrast." That's a start, but it leaves several decisions on the table that materially affect users with low vision.

Three defaults worth changing

• Line-height of 1.5 — WCAG 1.4.12 calls for at least 1.5x the font size. Most CMS defaults sit around 1.2-1.3.
• Maximum line length of 80 characters — beyond that, eye-tracking studies show fatigue rises sharply for users with reduced central vision.
• Avoid pure white — #fff on #000 produces glare that low-vision users describe as "stinging." A near-white like #fafafa removes the effect without hurting contrast ratios.

What we ship by default

Our base stylesheet uses 1.7 line-height (leaving room for users to bump to 2 in their reader settings without things breaking), max-width: 65ch on body copy, and oklch(99% 0 0) for the page background. None of these costs a single conversion.