Blog

Improving Accessibility with Dynamic Font Sizes

We’ve been working on a number of accessibility improvements to our apps for Android and iOS. Here’s a look at how dynamic font sizes are making our apps easier to read.

My name is Matt Miklic, and I lead a team of three designers dedicated to our native apps. We focus our time on the design of WordPress for Android and iOS.

Over the last few months, the developers and designers who work on our apps have been improving our support for the accessibility features available on mobile devices. This includes ensuring our apps properly support features like VoiceOver on iOS, and TalkBack on Android, which make the apps accessible to blind users.

One new feature I’d like to highlight is support for dynamic type sizes. This lets users choose larger (or smaller) text, to find the size that’s most comfortable for them to read. We recently made a change to the text used for blog posts and pages on iOS to make it even more readable. Now, no matter what text size the user prefers — even the largest sizes, which are huge — WordPress responds as the user should expect. This makes the app accessible to users with low vision, in a way that wasn’t possible before.

 

Screenshot of iPhones displaying text at the default and larger font sizes

 

If you use an Android device, you can customize your device’s font size, too.

 

Screenshot of Android devices showing default and larger font sizes

 

We’re continuing to perfect this feature, so if you notice parts of the apps where it doesn’t work quite right yet, drop us a line, and stay tuned for future improvements.

For more information on adjusting the font size on your device, see these articles:

By Matt Miklic

Designer, and other useful things.

Comments

[…] We were almost home! All that was left at this point was to create annotated mockups for our engineers to use during development. By keeping our typographical choices consistent with the standards on Android and iOS, we make life easier for developers since we can refer to type styles like “Body” and “Caption,” which have specific attributes defined by the operating system. This makes life easier for users too, since this lets us support accessibility features like dynamic font sizing. […]

Comments are closed.