Typography, accessibility, and how language becomes knowledge

My new talk is about using some new developments in CSS and variable fonts to rethink how we create typographic systems on the web. There’s a lot going on in the talk, and I plan to get into these elements separately in greater detail. But the ties with accessibility were such a fit with Chris’ talk that it seemed worthwhile to talk about them together. There should be videos available at some point and I’ll be sure to link to them when they’re live.

A few of the things I cover include fluid, dynamic typographic scaling using CSS custom properties, calculations, and variable fonts; supporting light mode preferences; and giving the user greater control over their own reading experience.

Chris’ talk was a perfect complement. He began with looking at the origins of different kinds of languages, and how that visual information becomes knowledge, and how it can go wrong. He’s also got tons of great references.

I hope you can get something out of the slides. I’ll be taking some of these topics and diving deeper on them in the coming weeks, but I thought this was a good time to give you an overview introduction.

Resources

• My presentation and resources on Dynamic Typography with Variable Fonts on noti.st
• Chris Lienert’s slides on Designing for Learning Difficulties
• An introduction to variable fonts I wrote for Monotype
• Variable Fonts Guide I wrote for MDN