This past March at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, I sat in on a talk by Terra Masiel, a senior product manager for books accessibility at Amazon. She opened with a piece of research that has been rattling around in my head ever since.
When researchers tested 16 fonts with more than 300 adult readers, they asked each person which font they thought they read best in. Then they measured which font each person actually read fastest in.
Of those 300 readers, 73% picked the font they assumed worked best for them.
Only 18% of them were right.
Think about that for a second. On average, people read about 35% faster in their optimal font than in their worst one. That works out to roughly 117 extra words per minute, or about 10 extra pages an hour. Most of us are probably using the wrong font and don’t even know it.
Given this, it’s worth taking a step back from the practical fixes I’ve been writing about so far and asking the bigger question:
What does it actually mean for something to be readable?
Terra reframed readability this way, and I’m going to borrow her phrasing because it gets directly to the heart of the matter:
Readability isn’t just a measure of the text itself, but is instead a highly complex interplay between the person doing the reading, the text that’s being read, and even your environment or circumstances.
In other words, readability isn’t a property of the words you write. It’s a relationship between three things.
The person consuming your content.
The content itself.
And the place they’re consuming it from.
That third one matters more than we give it credit for. Someone reading your newsletter at their desk with morning coffee is in a different situation than the same person reading it on a phone, on a crowded train, on the way home from a long day. The words haven’t changed. How they’re being read has.
Terra mapped six categories of factors that shape that relationship:
Content: What you wrote. Vocabulary, sentence structure, reading level, whether there are images or links or tables breaking up the text that can add to or take away from readability.
Form: How the text looks at the letter level. Typeface, weight, size, and color all need to be considered.
Display: How the page is laid out. Alignment, spacing, contrast, where things sit on the screen all impact readability. On a digital device, this can also be influenced by the settings the device allows to change these elements.
Support features: What tools are available alongside the text. Is there a built-in dictionary, text-to-speech reading, a way to dim distractions, or other things to aid the reader?
Environmental: The place the reading is happening in. What’s the lighting? Is there distraction, like noise? Is the person reading while in motion?
Personal: Who’s doing the reading. A range of things can come into play here, including if the reader has a disability, what their mood and energy level are, and what they already know about your topic.
You, as the creator of the content, can directly influence the first three. The last three you can’t control, but you can plan for them. Someone will read your post in bright sun on a phone. Someone will read it tired. Someone will read it via audio because they can’t see the screen.
A main point through Terra’s talk was that one of the most effective ways to improve readability across the board is to reduce cognitive load on the reader.
Cognitive load is just a name for how much mental work your audience has to do to take in what you’ve put in front of them. Every formatting choice you make is either adding to that work or subtracting from it.
Many of the tips I’ve been writing about the past few weeks help reduce that load:
Color contrast reduces the visual effort of distinguishing text from background.
Headings let your audience skim and find their section instead of reading every word in order.
Link text tells the reader where a link goes without making them puzzle it out from the surrounding sentence.
Alt text on a meaningful image provides a reader who uses assistive technology information they’d otherwise not be able to perceive at all.
When you use these best practices in your content, you remove some of the work your audience has to do when they read your work.
There’s another element in readability I haven’t covered yet and it’s key here: Plain language.
When my co-author Michele and I wrote Content for Everyone, we devoted a whole chapter to it, because for a working creator it’s one of the highest-leverage moves you can make. Plain language is text that’s been deliberately crafted so it takes less mental work for the people on the receiving end.
The ideas can be as complex as they need to be for the topic. It’s how those topics are presented that we’re keeping clear.
Here’s what that means for your writing:
Short, clear sentences and shorter paragraphs.
Technical terms are defined clearly on first use. Not everyone has the same vocabulary.
Acronyms spelled out on first use, even the ones you assume are universal.
Use bulleted and numbered lists to organize the content.
Present the same information more than one way when it matters, such as pairing words with an image, an example, or an analogy.
There are also things you can do on the formatting/display side to help your readers:
Left-aligned text is easier to read than centered or justified text, because every line starts at the same place and the spacing between words stays even.
Standard fonts are easier to read than fancy ones, especially for visitors with low vision or people who have cognitive disabilities that affect how they process text.
Long stretches of italic or bold text are hard to read, and on screen readers and other assistive technology that formatting doesn’t come through at all. Which is why I keep bold and italics for short phrases, not for whole paragraphs. All-caps text is hard to read too, so I never use it outside of acronyms or a single word for emphasis.
I’ll come back to plain language on its own in a future post. Today it’s enough to know that plain language is a cognitive-load reducer. It’s something you should consider when writing content to help your audience engage with what you’re putting into the world.
Terra’s also named categories that are outside what a creator can control. Someone is going to read your content in conditions you didn’t design for. Their lighting, their attention, their fatigue, the device they happen to be holding.
That isn’t a reason to throw your hands up. It’s a reason to do the work on the parts you can control, because the people whose situation makes reading harder are exactly the ones who benefit most when you’ve done what you can to relieve their cognitive load.
This is where “progress over perfection” is a key consideration. You may not make a piece of content that lands perfectly for every member of the audience in every environment. What you can do is improve your content with these tips going forward.
Pick one recent piece of your work: a newsletter, a blog entry, a long social media post, a page on your site.
Read it once and imagine cognitive load as a dial. Then ask one question. Where on this page am I making my audience work harder than they need to?
Maybe it’s a paragraph that should be two.
Maybe it’s a heading that you set as bold text rather than an actual heading.
Maybe it’s an unbroken wall of italics.
Maybe it’s a link that says “click here.”
Maybe it’s paragraphs that are centered rather than left aligned.
Maybe it’s a sentence that would be easier to understand if you simplified it.
It can be a challenge to put all these formatting considerations in our workflows, but if you do you’ll have readers who will have an easier time with your content.
If you spot something and want to share it, I’d love to hear what you noticed. Reply or leave a comment with what you find, or send a screenshot.
Next Thursday (June 25) is captions and transcripts for audio and video. I’ll share what I learned about the workflow across 470 episodes of Big Gay Fiction Podcast.
See you next Thursday.
— Jeff
This article was inspired by Terra Masiel’s talk “Making Text Work for Everyone: Readability in Action,” CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, March 2026.
If you want to read more on the font readability research, check out Accelerating Adult Readers with Typeface: A Study of Individual Preferences and Effectiveness and Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals (pdf), which are both authored by Shaun Wallace, et al.
Digital Accessibility – Content for Everyone is a free weekly post from Jeff Adams about making your digital content—your site, your podcast, your newsletter, your social media—usable by everyone who shows up to it. Built on the foundation of Content for Everyone, the book Jeff co-wrote with Michele Lucchini. Companion site: contentforeveryone.info.
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