Readability

Content should be readable by everyone, regardless of their circumstances. Color blindness or the sun on a device's screen should not be barriers to access.

Contrast

When using text, make sure that it provides enough color contrast to be read comfortably. Check the contrast between the colors used for the text and its background. Accessibility note: Provide at least level AA sufficient contrast (4.5:1). The color palette provides the contrast levels for pure white and black surfaces, but you need to ensure the contrast on other combinations.

Tracking and leading

Text spacing. How text is placed in space can affect its readability. Follow these considerations for text paragraphs:

• Line length for reading in English is ideally no longer than 75 characters.
• Line height should be 1.6 times the size of the font used. Internationalization note: Use a bigger line height in a relative size unit like rem or em, not in an absolute like px, to prevent clipping of some Indic scripts, for example Burmese.

Dynamic text

Content will be available in multiple languages, and text length will vary for pieces of content across languages. Avoid designing interfaces that depend on certain expectations about text length.

Here are few ways to tackle dynamic text:

• Uncrowded user interface. Design with an eye for simplicity. Consider reducing the number of elements to ensure the remaining ones have enough room.
• Dynamic layout. Make containers expandable, so that they can fit the content.
• Dynamic text. Adjust the size depending on the content. Use a smaller font-size for long content.
• Clipping. Clip the text with ellipsis, only if there is no risk of missing important information or the complete information is reachable through a clear alternative means.

Typefaces

Text can be read in multiple languages on different devices. We recommend using the fonts already available on each device and operating system. This keeps the experience simple and consistent with the platform conventions and ensures widest language script support as provided by the operating systems themselves. The following sections provides a selection criteria for choosing appropriate typefaces, and how to apply it on different platforms.

Font selection criteria

To select an appropriate font family for a given language script or device, follow these criteria:

1. Readability. Fonts with a bigger x-height and open shapes are preferred.
2. Neutral aspect. The font should work with many different kinds of content without adding a particular voice to it.
3. Simple shapes. Fonts with less complex shapes work better at smaller sizes and on low-resolution devices.
4. Open. Open source fonts are preferred to align with the open knowledge they deliver.

Platform-specific fonts

We recommend relying on the operating system's default sans-serif typeface.^[1][2]

Most platforms have plenty of options for supporting latin-based languages, where the serif concept makes sense. Among the different serif system fonts we recommend Georgia (present in many operating systems).

Below you can see an example CSS code to support the default system fonts:

/**
 * System font stack for sans-serif fonts
 *
 * `-apple-system` ('San Francisco' font) – Support Safari 9+ macOS and iOS, Firefox macOS
 * `BlinkMacSystemFont` ('San Francisco' font) – Chrome 48+ macOS and iOS
 * `Segoe UI` – Windows Vista & newer
 * `Roboto` – Android 4.0+
 * `Lato` – Wikimedia Design choice, OFL licensed
 * `Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif` – (Generic) Web fallback
 * Note that standard `system-ui` value has resulted in unresolved side-effects in certain OS/language combinations as of now and is therefore not included.
 */
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Fonts are not always available for all scripts or all operating systems. For example, Helvetica does not support the Korean script. Using the default font on the user device for Korean text seems the safest choice, unless there is a better candidate based on the selection criteria described above, and selected by someone familiar with the script.

Platform-neutral fonts

• Charter is a serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter in 1987. Charter has a simplified and clean structure that works well, even on low resolution displays. Although Bitstream Charter is the original implementation for Charter, we recommend using Charis SIL since it provides a wider Unicode support.
• Lato is a sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic in 2010. Lato provides good readability even at small sizes.
• The Noto family provides a great coverage of languages, providing good alternatives for both serif and sans-serif typefaces.

These fonts are provided as a reference, but you may select other free fonts using similar criteria when the recommended ones are not available in your context.

Use of styles

The recommended styles are intended to optimize readability of Wikipedia’s dense encyclopedic content.

In our guidelines we use scale-independent pixels (sp). They can result in a different number of actual pixels in the user screen due to screen density or user preferences. A 16 sp text is rendered as 16 px in a 1x device at standard zoom level, but it becomes 21 px in a 2x device (or when zoomed 200% on a 1x device).

Common text styles are based on the defined scale to clearly communicate the content hierarchy.
Color hints are guidance for general use case in a light mode theme.

Heading 1

Charter Regular 32 sp

Heading 2

System sans-serif 600 / Lato Bold 24 sp

Heading 3

System sans-serif 600 / Lato Bold 20 sp

Heading 4

System sans-serif 600 / Lato Bold 18 sp

Heading 5

System sans-serif 600 / Lato Bold 16 sp

Heading 6

Lato Regular / system sans-serif 16 sp,
All headings are in Base0

Body,
Paragraph

Lato Regular / system sans-serif 16 sp in Base10
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Quis reprehenderit minima voluptates doloribus nemo, enim eius. Itaque laudantium, praesentium maiores distinctio! Voluptate ipsam consequatur corrupti inventore cum illo quae modi.

Complementary

Lato Regular / system sans-serif 14 sp in Base30 or in Base10

Block quotation
citation

Charter Italic 20 sp, 4px border before in Base80
Lato regular / system sans-serif 14 sp

Figure caption

Small text

Lato Regular/ system sans-serif 13 sp

Placeholder

Lato Regular/ system sans-serif 16 sp in Base30

Unordered List

• Lato Regular/
• system sans-serif
• 16 sp
• CSS default values
• List item first order list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside;
  
  • Nested list item order list-style-type: circle;
    • Nested list item third order list-style-type: square;

Ordered List

777. Lato Regular/
778. system sans-serif
779. 16 sp
780. list-style-position: outside;
     
     1. Nested list item

Code

/**
 * System font stack for monospace fonts
 *
 * `Menlo` – macOS 10.6+
 * `Consolas` – Windows Vista & newer
 * `Liberation Mono` – Fedora, Ubuntu, … OFL licensed
 * `'Courier New', monospace` – (Generic) web font fallback
 */
font-family: 'Menlo', 'Consolas', 'Liberation Mono', 'Courier New', monospace;
font-size: 14px; /* 14 sp equivalent */

References

1. For a historic reference on the former default platform-specific font families choice in 2014, a predecessor of current selection, see Typography_refresh/Font_choice on mediawiki.org
2. Find a selection of background information on fonts in our choice at Font family stack article on mediawiki.org