4 Make text easy to understand
This chapter covers
- Writing content that respects human constraints.
- Why it matters to define the content’s language.
- Ensuring readable fonts and colors.
- Making your text elastic enough to adjust and adapt as needed.
Content is only valuable if people can both perceive it and understand it. In the previous chapter, we focused on perception, covering contrast, the use of color, and the provision of alternative text for images, audio, and video. Now we turn to understanding. Even when content is visible, it can still create barriers if people cannot easily understand it without too much effort.
In this chapter, we explore how to write text that respects human cognitive limits, how and why to define the language of your content, and how to choose fonts and colors that support readability. We’ll also look at how to make your text flexible so that it adapts to different screen sizes, zoom levels, orientations, and any user preferences.
Text is central to most web applications, and we need to get it right – which is why we must consider writing styles, multilingual support, typography, spacing, and responsiveness.
So, let’s start off with the first principle: writing text that people can easily understand.