Visual Presentation
For blocks of text, users must be able to control foreground/background color, line width (max 80 characters), justification (no full-justify), line spacing (1.5x), and paragraph spacing (1.5x line height) — without horizontal scrolling at 200% zoom.
What it asks
For long-form text content, the SC bundles five requirements: users can choose foreground and background colors; line length doesn’t exceed 80 characters (40 for Chinese, Japanese, Korean); text is not fully justified; line spacing is at least 1.5 within paragraphs and paragraph spacing is at least 1.5x line height; and text can be resized to 200% without horizontal scrolling and without requiring assistive technology.
How to meet it
- Constrain reading columns to roughly 60-75 characters per line for English body text.
- Use left-aligned (or right-aligned for RTL languages) text, never
text-align: justify. - Set
line-heightto at least 1.5 on body copy and use generousmargin-bottombetween paragraphs. - Offer a user-settable theme or respect
prefers-color-schemeso foreground/background are user-controllable. - Test at 200% zoom: text should reflow within the column, no horizontal scroll.
Common failures
- Magazine-style fully-justified columns that produce rivers of whitespace and slow reading.
- Body text rendered in wide containers with 120+ characters per line.
line-height: 1.2body copy that crowds lines together and breaks low-vision reading.- No theme picker, no respect for
prefers-color-scheme.
Why it matters
AAA, rarely a contract requirement. But the underlying advice — short lines, generous spacing, no full justification — is just good typography. Meeting this SC is a side effect of designing for readability rather than density.