If you’re a fan of Times New Roman, I have some bad news: The state government doesn’t want you. Not online, anyway.
If you plan on uploading a document after April 23 to Transparent NH, a website that hosts a ton of state budget information and revenue and expense data, it better not be written in that font. Or in any font that has serifs, those little lines attached to strokes in letters.
Also, the text better not be justified (typesetting lingo for spacing out words to fill space) or underlined, and state abbreviations like NH must come directly after a town name and not float around in the middle of a sentence, like it just did. Plus, decorative images must be marked as decorative, color cannot be used merely to create emphasis and you should keep the reading level at eighth grade or easier.
These restrictions were handed down recently by the NH Department of Administrative Services, and they have drawn some strong reactions. The person who brought it to my attention wrote in his email: “The font police will pry Times New Roman out of my cold dead hands.” Later he added sarcastic (I hope) plans to submit documents written in Comic Sans.
What’s the cause of this? The American with Disabilities Act. Specifically, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a.k.a. WCAG, which are designed to make online content accessible to people dealing with various physical or mental issues.
These guidelines have been around since the late 1990s, when the World Wide Web was just becoming important enough that lack of access was a true handicap. It has been tweaked and rewritten many times since then, as technology has changed, most notably with cellphones, and requirements have tightened.
“Two years ago, a new rule was added to ADA Title II that provides technical guidance on how to make web content and mobile applications accessible. The rule, which goes into effect (this month), requires state and local governments to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,” Kathryn Michener, Director of User Experience and chief digital accessibility officer for the New Hampshire Department of Information Technology, wrote in response to my query. “Additionally, there are best practices that are not required but are generally seen to improve both accessibility and user experience.”
All this sounds like nit-picking but it is a big deal for people whose ability to gather sensory inputs — mostly sight but also hearing in some circumstances — are different from levels that most of us regard as standard.
For example, underlining words and using color as amplifier are frowned on because they don’t get picked up by software that reads text out loud to the blind. Fonts with serifs make it harder for people with low vision to distinguish certain letters in smaller print, especially on a screen. Requiring us to take time to add “alt text” to posted photos that don’t have a caption — posting a quick description of the artwork — makes pictures accessible to visually impaired folks who otherwise would be clueless about what’s going on.
All this is a minor burden on people without disabilities. We prefer serif type in many situations and like to use underlining and color to help communicate emphasis. Having this taken away can be annoying, the digital equivalent of not being allowed to use the best parking spot because it’s reserved for the handicapped.
On occasion, though, it’s a benefit to everybody. The ubiquity of closed captions on videos is an example; if the deaf community hadn’t pushed for it years ago, I’d never understand what they’re saying in British murder mysteries.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering, I’m writing this in Times New Roman. And I always add alt-text to photos.
