Best Practices: Text Styles
- Font size: Minimum 18, Ideal 24+
- Line spacing: 1.5, minimum 1.0
- Background: White
- Font colors, dark gray: RGB 66, 66, 66
- Our templates use WSU Brand colors.
- Don’t use underlining, highlights, or text color alone to emphasize or create meaning.
- Underlining denotes hyperlinks.
- Highlighting creates problems with color contrast.
- Color alone may be difficult for a color-blind person to understand.
- Do use bold or italic styling sparingly to emphasize words or short phrases within the body of text.
- To call attention to an entire sentence or section, consider writing “Important” before the content.
- Use left or right text alignment.
- Centered text is not optimal. Studies have proven that centered text is taxing on the brain and slows down processing speeds.
Video and Audio
- For embedded videos in PowerPoints, provide the video URL for students to access outside of class.
- Captioning should be included for videos and audios.
Color and Color Contrast
- This first relates to the layout of your presentation or document and how a screen reader reads the content.
- When presenting, avoid visual references. Change above and below to previously and following respectively. Adjust left and right to something that is not exclusively visual (e.g., “data in the lab results column” instead of “right-hand column”).
- Do not identify something by color alone.
- Font and background colors must meet WCAG standards.
- If you use the WSU templates, the color contrast is built in.
- Use Colorkit.co.
Need assistance?
Contact the College of Medicine Digital Accessibility Team if you have questions or need one-on-one support or additional training.
Contact the Digital Accessibility Team