SAMHSA's Section 508 Resources

Section 508 FAQs

 “Documents must utilize the recommended fonts i.e. Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial, Tahoma and Helvetica. If they do not, they do not pass the 508 compliance checklist that must accompany each document for web site update submission.”

Q. The statement above is found in the checklist for PDF files. Do we really have to do (or redo) all of our products to these “recommended fonts”?  This could be very costly, and reduce the visual appeal of our products for those that don’t use the technologies for persons with visual impairments.

“This question refers to one of the requirments that HHS put into their checklists.  In reality the font “requirement” is a usability concern when applied to websites, and an accessibility concern when applied to PDF documents. 

Document Safe Typography

Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, and Helvetica are the five common fonts that are distributed with Windows/Mac/Linux by default – for the last 15 years.  They belong to a very small, exclusive group of fonts called “Document Safe Typography”.The default font for MS Word documents is Arial or Times New Roman (depending on system setup).  The default font for the web is Times New Roman (this is build into both the DOCTYPE engine and the actual web browser engines such as Mozilla and Gecko). 

The reason that documents and websites should be made utilizing these fonts is because everyone has them on their computers and hand-held devices (such as Palms and iPhones).  Again while this is a usability concern (when talking about web pages) and not accessibility.

Fonts and Document Accessibility

If you create a Word or PDF document in a special font like Frutiger (which most people don't have on their computer), when the Reader program tries to render on the computer of someone who doesn’t have that font, it goes back to Times New Roman or Arial automatically.  Some PDF’s actually hang or crash when they try to load up a PDF that uses fonts not available on their systems, and you can’t really embed a font in a PDF, so you can’t “force” someone to use special fonts.

That said, if any contractor wishes to use special fonts for their products, then the special fonts have to be confined to images and not actual text.  Otherwise they must use the “Document Safe Typography”.

Please note that this all refers to documents being posted to the web, and not documents strictly being created for print.  If a document is being created strictly for print anyway, Section 508 doesn’t actually apply. “

 

Last Update: 06/17/2009