A data scientist is preparing a dashboard for a broad audience that includes executives, technical peers, and external stakeholders with unknown visual acuity. The dashboard will be displayed on large presentation screens and accessed on individual laptops. The company mandates adherence to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards for all digital content. To ensure the charts and annotations are legible and compliant, which font selection strategy should the data scientist implement?
Utilize a monospace font like Courier New for all numerical labels to ensure perfect vertical alignment, and allow the font size to be determined automatically by the dashboard's responsive layout.
Select a serif font like Garamond for its traditional readability, and set the size to 10 points to maximize the data density on complex charts.
Implement the company's official condensed brand font to ensure stylistic consistency, relying on the high resolution of modern displays to maintain legibility.
Use a sans-serif font family like Verdana or Arial with a minimum size of 12 points for all chart text, ensuring the layout allows text resizing up to 200% without content overlap.
The correct strategy is to use a widely available sans-serif font like Verdana or Arial, set a minimum size of 12 points (or 16 pixels), and ensure the layout supports resizing up to 200%. Sans-serif fonts are broadly recognized for their high legibility on digital screens. A minimum size of 12 points (16 pixels) is a well-established baseline for accessible text. A critical component of WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is ensuring that users can resize text up to 200% without breaking the layout or losing information, which makes the layout's flexibility a key part of the strategy.
Using a serif font like Garamond at 10 points is incorrect because serif fonts are generally considered less readable on screens compared to in print, and a 10-point size is typically too small to be considered accessible for users with visual impairments.
Prioritizing a condensed brand font over a more legible, standard font fails to meet accessibility requirements. Stylistic consistency should not compromise readability and compliance with standards like WCAG.
While using a monospace font can be useful for aligning columns of numbers, it is not the optimal choice for all text on a chart (like titles and labels). Furthermore, allowing a responsive layout to solely determine font size without setting a clear, accessible minimum fails to guarantee legibility for all users.
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