Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
20 results found in typography.
- Bionic Reading (Bionic Font, Bold Fixation Points)
- A typographic technique that bolds the first few letters of each word to create artificial fixation points, guiding the eye through text more quickly and helping maintain reading focus. The technique …
- Character Spacing (Letter Spacing, Tracking)
- The horizontal space between individual characters in a line of text. Research has shown that increasing character spacing significantly improves reading speed and accuracy for people with dyslexia. T…
- Expressive Captions (Affective Captions, Emotion Captions, Typographic Captions)
- Captions that go beyond literal word-for-word transcription to convey the prosodic, emotional, or speaker-identity information that traditional captions strip out. Expressive captions may modulate fon…
- Italic Font Style (italics, oblique)
- A slanted or cursive-style variant of a typeface, traditionally used for emphasis, titles, or foreign words. Eye-tracking research demonstrates that italic fonts create significant accessibility barri…
- Kanji (Han Characters (in Japanese))
- Logographic characters of Chinese origin used in the Japanese writing system alongside the two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Modern Japanese uses about 2,000-3,000 commonly-occurring kanji,…
- Legibility
- The visual clarity with which individual characters, words, and blocks of text can be distinguished and recognised. Legibility is influenced by font choice (sans-serif fonts are generally more legible…
- Line Spacing (Leading, Line Height, Line-Height)
- The vertical distance between lines of text, controlled in CSS by the line-height property. Adequate line spacing is important for readability and accessibility, particularly for people with low visio…
- Monospaced Font (fixed-width font, fixed-pitch font, non-proportional font)
- A typeface in which every character occupies the same horizontal space, regardless of its width. Examples include Courier, Consolas, and Monaco. Research shows monospaced fonts like Courier lead to sh…
- OpenDyslexic (Open Dyslexic)
- A free, open-source typeface specifically designed to improve readability for people with dyslexia. The font uses heavier bottom portions on letters to help prevent visual rotation and uses unique let…
- Proportional Font (variable-width font)
- A typeface in which characters have varying widths based on their natural proportions—a narrow "i" takes less space than a wide "m". Most fonts used in everyday reading are proportional, including Ari…
- Relative Font Sizing (Relative Units, Scalable Typography, Flexible Font Sizes)
- The practice of specifying text sizes using relative units (such as em, rem, or percentages) rather than absolute units (such as pixels or points), allowing text to scale when users adjust their brows…
- Ruby Annotation (Ruby Text, Furigana, Ruby Markup)
- Small glossing text placed above, beside, or below a base character to indicate pronunciation or meaning — most commonly used for Japanese furigana (kana reading hints above kanji), but also applied i…
- Sans-Serif Font (sans serif, grotesque font)
- A typeface that lacks the small projecting lines (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are generally recommended for screen readability and are of…
- Serif Font (roman typeface)
- A typeface with small decorative lines or strokes (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Common serif fonts include Times New Roman, Garamond, and Georgia. While traditionally associated with print l…
- Speech-modulated Typography (Speech-driven Typography, Prosody-driven Typography)
- A design technique in which the visual properties of text — typically font weight, width, or size on a variable-font axis — are modulated in real time by features extracted from a corresponding speech…
- Text Justification (Text Alignment, Justified Text)
- The alignment of text along the left and/or right margins of a text block. Left-aligned (ragged right) text has even spacing between words and an uneven right edge, while fully justified (left-right) …
- Tiresias (Tiresias Screenfont, Tiresias Font Family)
- A family of typefaces developed in 1998 by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) specifically designed for legibility on screen displays, particularly television subtitling. Named after …
- Typographic Modulation (Typographic Variation, Dynamic Typography)
- Systematic variation of a typeface's visual parameters — weight, width, slant, size, colour, letter spacing, baseline shift, opacity — to carry information beyond the literal words, typically driven b…
- Variable Font (OpenType Variable Font, Parametric Font)
- A font file that contains multiple design variations along one or more continuous axes — weight, width, slant, optical size, or custom axes — allowing any intermediate value to be rendered at run time…
- Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF)
- Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF) is a content presentation method that formats text based on its syntactic structure, using indentation, line breaks, and visual grouping to align with the gramm…