Don't use images to display text

Don’t use images to display text on your website. It may look nicer, oftentimes the same effect can be generated using style sheets while making the text more accessible to all users.

Publishing information on a website gives users some control over their access to the information, as they can alter the font size, colour and contrast. But this only works if the content has been added as text to your web pages.

Mobile Users

Using an image to display text means that the lines cannot reflow when the width of the browser or screen changes. This means mobile users are left with sometimes long lines of text squashed or zoomed to fit the width of their device making it difficult to read.

Low Vision Users

Uses with vision problems will find images are difficult to read because althought they may regulary “zoom-in” or increase the text size on websites, this cannot be done with images. Or when it can the images become blurry when scaled up in their browser.

Screenreaders

Users who rely on screen readers will also struggle with text in images. The screen reader will only be able to read aloud the alternative (alt) text on the image which will be read as a single run-on sentence. It won’t be able to identify headings tables or lists of text.

• Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility — accessibility.blog.gov.uk
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative - Images Tutorial — w3.org