Best Practices for Improving the Website Readability
How to make sure your blog posts are reading smoothly? Are you thinking about a redesign and want to ensure the best possible experience for your users?
Google has always considered users as their first priority and they have always updated their algorithms for better user experience from time to time.
Follow these best practices to improve the website readability of elements on your site.
Make Sure Your Texts are Legible
Let’s start with the easiest to set up: your texts should be pleasant to read. This is especially important on pages loaded with content, such as a blog post or explanatory content about your business.
To ensure enjoyable reading, follow the guide:
Choose an Easy-to-read Typography
The titles of your pages can have typography that reflects your graphic charter, but for the body of text one will avoid the eccentricities: prefer a typography “without serifs”.
Texts Must be Big Enough
Your paragraphs should be written with sufficient size: size of 16px will suffice, but if you feel that your users may have difficulty seeing, feel free to switch to 18px or 20px (for example, if your target audience is older than the average Internet user).
Sometimes you see sites with smaller texts in mobile version, to display more content on small smartphone screens: don’t do it, your users wont have a better view when using their phone.
Adjust Line Spacing to Make Paragraphs Airier
For a block of text to be pleasant to read, its lines must be sufficiently spaced: set the leading to at least 1.5 times the size of the text. For example, text in 16px size should have at least 24px leading.
Contrast Your Texts
Finally, your texts must be sufficiently contrasted. Text in light gray looks good, but be careful to keep it legible. Prefer a sufficiently dark shade.
The thickness of the characters is also important: most typographies offer a wide range of weights, from thin to black, including regular and bold weights. Your body texts should be regular to have good contrast.
Make Sure Your Elements Have Sufficient Contrast
Not all of your users can see the elements of your site in the same way: some have vision defects, others are in an environment less conducive to reading (with reflections on their screen, or outdoors with poor screen brightness, etc.).
For this reason, you need to make sure that all your text, buttons, and graphics needed for navigation have good contrast, for off-road readability.
Think About Users With Impaired Vision
Let’s go a little further in the constraints related to web accessibility, and let’s take a look at Internet users who have vision problems.
Take the case of people with color blindness: in France, the proportion of color blind is around 8% in men and 0.4% in women, with several types of color blindness. Your site must therefore can be visited by people who are unable to see all the colors.
Using colors in an interface is very useful for communicating information, but you shouldn’t rely entirely on it. Because then, some users will have a degraded experience.
For this instance, you can also hire a professional website developer who can maintain the proportion and always complete the information with a textual or visual element that will be clear to everyone.
Summing It Up
Web accessibility is a much broader issue that aims to make sites and services usable for all people with disabilities (visually impaired, hearing impaired, motor disabled, etc.).
Good accessibility requires an optimized visual interface, but also compatibility with other possible interfaces, such as screen readers used by visually impaired people.
The technical standards for optimal accessibility are defined by the W3C in the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
You should never compromise with the user experience and readability because after all your users are your future customers. Applying these best practices for improving the readability will provide a better user experience and more user-friendly for a large part of your users.
