Making text accessible should be part of everyday practice. However, general typographic practices of optimizing legibility and readability don’t necessarily go all the way towards making text accessible.

“Should I use pixels or rems?”. In this comprehensive blog post, we'll answer this question once and for all. You'll learn about the accessibility implications, and how to determine the best unit to use in any scenario.

Are “accessible” fonts actually as accessible as they claim? If not, what are the things we need to know when choosing a font that responds to different reader needs? This session will explore what dyslexia is, what cognitively happens when we read, and what elements of a typeface make a difference to how accessible it is, and to whom. Bruno, David, and Gareth have decades of experience between them. Bruno as a Typeface Designer, David as a Typographer, and Gareth as a UX Design/Accessibility expert. Together they spent over 3 years researching and steering the creation of BBC Reith family, the BBC’s corporate accessible typeface. This session is from the Design track. About the speaker: Gareth Ford Williams, BBC, Head of User Experience Design, Accessibility Preferred Pronoun: He/Him Gareth Ford Williams In 2005 Gareth founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. Over the course of the first 3 years the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team ensuring BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product. The accessibility team became part of UX when the BBC’s UX Design Team was founded in 2008. Gareth established the Design Research Team in 2010 and subsequently became a Head of UX Design. His team manages a network of over 200 Accessibility Champions, the oldest network of its kind in the industry. His team has also pioneered Mobile Accessibility Guidelines, BBC MAG, which were the first in the industry which have been used by thousands of organisations around the world. He has an interest in accessible typography going back his time on attachment as a product manager at YouView where he led the work on selecting the UI typeface, and since then he was a key stakeholder in the delivery of BBC Reith and BBC Qalam. About the speaker: David Bailey, BBC, UX Principal Preferred Pronoun: He/Him David cut his teeth as a designer in the nineties working with world-renowned agency The Designers Republic. In 2005 he formed his own studio, Kiosk, which produced cutting-edge design and branding for the music, arts, fashion and broadcast industries. He joined the BBC as a design director in 2013, spearheading the development of its digital design framework, GEL, and the introduction of their corporate typeface ‘BBC Reith’. This work helped inspire the formation of The Readability Group, alongside Bruno Maag and Gareth Ford Williams. About the speaker: Bruno Maag, Dalton Maag, Typeface Designer Preferred Pronoun: He/Him Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded and led Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design where he worked with some of the best known brands: Amazon, Nokia, Intel, HP, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook, DHL, FedEx, ABB, BBC, Rakuten amongst many others. All these brands have in common that their typography needs to be as accessible as possible to the clients’ audiences. 00:00 Don’t Believe The Type! 38:18 Q&A Learn more about axe-con at: https://www.deque.com/axe-con/