Text style readable (minimum)
Group: text-and-wording • Guideline: text-appearance
Summary in Plain English
The same properties at a minimum level: the authored text style meets baseline values, still to be determined.
Why It Matters
This is the floor below which text is difficult for a large share of readers regardless of any setting they might change.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Quoted from the provision's informative document, informative/guidelines/text-and-wording/text-appearance/text-style-readable-minimum.md. It is the group's own procedure, not an editorial testing guide.
Procedure
For each block of text:
- Check that the attributes of the block of text are within the attributes specified in the provision.
Expected results
- #1 is true.
W3C Working Group Status
Open Questions Recorded in the Draft
The editors' own notes (:::ednote) in
guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/text-appearance/text-style-readable-minimum.md.
These are the questions the group has written down as unresolved —
not a summary of discussion written here.
If you are aware of research in this area, especially involving non-Latin scripts, please email public-agwg-comments@w3.org.
W3C Threads on This Provision
9 GitHub threads carrying 102 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
What the Argument Is About
The most contested provision in the draft: what counts as readable text, how to measure it, and in which unit.
Positions taken in the thread
A requirement is only useful if authors can apply it and two testers reach the same verdict. CSS px is defensible as the anchor because it is defined by visual angle rather than physical pixels, so it is device-independent. Browser zoom — the default control, persistent across sites — is the user's route to larger text, so a minimum size plus available magnification is judged sufficient.
CSS font-size is a poor proxy for legibility: x-height and stroke weight vary enormously between typefaces at the same nominal size, and rendering differs by OS and font cut. sdw32 points to the EN 301 549 draft, which gives an x-height of at least 8 CSS px for the smallest text as best practice, and proposes handling weight by pixel density rather than the binary normal/bold split. Myndex argues a test that is merely testable, without being useful, gets codified into law with unintended consequences. Myndex nonetheless defends the CSS px, defined by visual angle, as the right reference unit for guidelines, with x-height rather than font-size as the measure.
px ignores a user's configured root font size while rem respects it, so anchoring the standard in px effectively tells the market that overriding user preference is acceptable. chaals lands in the middle: provide both a baseline that conveys a commonly legible absolute size and clear guidance that resizing must actually work — and reports from browsing ~100 pages at 64px that most sites, news sites especially, become unusable, which he attributed mainly to layouts set in pixels.
"Does not use a decorative or cursive font face" is called subjective and over-broad. Finnberrys, a voice-recognition user, wants underlining restricted to links because randomly underlined text repeatedly reads as a link. julierawe wants "most text" defined before the requirement can be tested.
x-height does not translate to Japanese, Chinese or Korean, so any text-appearance metric has to be checked against non-Latin writing systems before it ships in a global standard.
Agreed
- No one defended WCAG 2's binary normal/bold font-weight classification. TestPartners noted weight 600 is common in practice and said that if the binary is kept the spec must say how intermediate values are treated; patrickhlauke, Myndex and sdw32 went further, arguing the nominal CSS weight value is not a reliable measure across typefaces.
- Any size metric has to be density-neutral, not "as measured on screen", because authors cannot control or test physical rendering.
- detlevhfischer and Myndex both found the "decorative or cursive font face" wording too restrictive to stand as a requirement; no one in the thread defended it.
- No one disputed GreggVan's point that a requirement need not be machine-testable as long as it is objective enough for different evaluators to reach the same conclusion, though Myndex countered that testability alone is not helpful if the test lacks utility.
Still open
- Whether there is any minimum size requirement for default text presentation at all. sdw32 registered deep concern that it was removed; GreggVan's position is that if a size is legible for typical vision, OS magnification covers low vision. chaals also argued WCAG should state a reasonable default text size; alastc pointed to the editor's draft Text style readable (minimum) provision, at a fairly small equivalent of 10pt, as that baseline. In #407 solhell proposed raising the minimum to 12pt, GreggVan replied that this mixes up minimum and body text size, and hidde asked that authors not be forced to set a size at all.
- px versus rem versus x-height as the anchoring unit.
- Whether APCA replaces the 4.5:1 contrast ratio. sydneycolemanfromgoogle challenged the disruption to tooling, design systems and existing UIs and asked for research showing the benefit outweighs it. Myndex replied that the WCAG 2 ratio produces false passes and fails, that tooling changes are small, and that the working group has not committed to any specific replacement.
- Whether accessible typeface guidance belongs in WCAG 3 at all, given there is no CSS-queryable way to assess a font and font choice is effectively unbounded (issue #245).
Note
Issue #642 became contentious enough that the chair stepped in to clarify that GitHub threads are individual discussion, not a formal working-group response channel. alastc, as a chair, later drafted a response for the AG group proposing to close #642 without change, noting WCAG 3 does not use px or rem values for text-sizing; graphic-designer objected and the draft awaits group consensus.
- #99 Avoid all capital letters open 3 comments · updated 2026-04-16
- #190 1.4.5 / 1.4.9 Image of Text and <text> inside SVGs open 6 comments · updated 2026-05-02
- #245 Consider adding guideline for Accessible Type Faces open 8 comments · updated 2026-05-02
- #266 Requirements: Text appearance open 27 comments · updated 2026-09-02
- #407 2.2.1 Text Appearance: reformulate minimum size requirements? open 4 comments · updated 2026-05-29
- #475 What counts as "most text" in Readable Text Style (minimum)? open 0 comments · updated 2026-03-29
- #536 Text Appearance - Text style readable (minimum) open 1 comment · updated 2026-04-12
- #641 Text style readable: underlining of text open 0 comments · updated 2026-04-15
- #642 Replace absolute units (px) with relative units (rem) as the baseline for font-size in WCAG 3.0 Outcomes. open 53 comments · updated 2026-06-19
WCAG 2.2 Criteria That Map Here
From this site's reviewed WCAG 2.2 → WCAG 3 map. The map is an interpretation, not a W3C mapping: W3C has not published one yet.
No mapping recorded. No WCAG 2.2 criterion in this site's map is recorded as a predecessor of this provision.
W3C Raw Source Text
Verbatim from guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/text-appearance/text-style-readable-minimum.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/text-and-wording/text-appearance/text-style-readable-minimum.md
The default/authored presentation of text style property meets the minimum @@ [values to be determined] for: * typeface * font size * font width * text decoration * letter spacing * capitalization * end-of-line hyphenation :::ednote If you are aware of research in this area, especially involving non-Latin scripts, please email public-agwg-comments@w3.org. :::