Goal
Ensure text readability is optimized for all players, including those with low vision, by displaying text at minimum default sizes and spacing and providing configurable style and color options.Overview
Roughly 2.9 billion people have some degree of low vision — blur, cloudiness, or partial vision loss that glasses can’t fully correct. Situational impairments (a screen far away, a small mobile display, muted TV, noisy room) also make text hard to read. If a player can’t read menu text, they can be blocked before gameplay even starts. Text also carries HUDs, objectives, hints, NPC lines, and player chat — losing it means losing the game.Scoping questions
Is reading required in your game?- Are navigable menus text-based?
- Does text appear on-screen during gameplay (HUD, objectives, waypoints, NPC lines)?
- Can players communicate via text chat, chat wheels, STT/TTS?
What “text display” covers
- Size — how large or small text can be
- Face — bold, italic, light
- Weight — thickness
- Style — font family
- Spacing — between letters, words, lines
- Alignment — horizontal alignment
- Case — sentence case, all caps
- Color — visibility against background (see XAG 102: Contrast)
Measuring text size
Font size in the XAGs is body height — the pixel distance from the lowest descender to the highest ascender.1
Capture the text
Screenshot the text in-game and open it in Microsoft Paint.
2
Find the tallest ascender and lowest descender
Locate a word with letters like
g, y, h, b to establish the full body height.3
Handle outlines
Include colored-outline pixels only if their contrast to the background exceeds 2:1. Softer anti-aliasing pixels are not counted.
4
Draw a selection
Draw a rectangular selection from the highest ascender to the lowest descender. Paint reports the pixel height in the lower-left — that number is the font size.
Key areas that must be accessible
- Menu screens — labels, sub-labels, descriptors, interaction prompts
- Gameplay environments — HUD meters, instructional cues, inventory keys
- Chat input fields — placeholder text and typed messages
- Chat windows — sent and received messages
- Chat wheels — pre-written comm-wheel options
- Subtitles and captions
- Error messages, toasts, and notifications
- Loading screens with valuable tips
Implementation guidelines
Minimum default text size
Measured as body height (descender + x-height + ascender).These are minimum defaults at launch. Provide the option to scale larger or smaller at the player’s discretion.
Mobile devices have much higher DPIs than TVs or PC displays, so comparably sized text needs more pixels. A 5.5” 1080p screen is roughly 400 DPI. Scale linearly as DPI increases.
Icons and glyph sizes
- Text inside icons and glyphs (e.g. the
Xin an X-button glyph) meets the same minimum sizes above. - Icons and glyphs scale with text scaling up to 200% of the minimum default.
- To keep glyphs inside text containers, you may need to grow the surrounding text so the whole glyph fits on the line.
Text scaling
- Players can resize text up to 200% of the minimum without losing content, functionality, or meaning.
- Large header text remains visually differentiated from body text when scaled.
- Text that scales off-screen has a way to be read (scrolling text, popouts, or appropriate abbreviations).
- Scaling never forces two-axis scrolling within a single UI. One-direction scrolling is fine.
- Allowing text to be smaller than the default is acceptable when the user opts in.
Font style
- Include at least one sans-serif typeface option.
- If stylistic fonts are used (dripping blood, gothic, etc.), provide a non-stylized alternative.
- All fonts include complete character sets for every supported language.
Text spacing
Greater spacing improves clarity, especially at large sizes. For blocks of text longer than two lines at standard font size:- Prefer letting players configure line width, line spacing, paragraph spacing, letter spacing, and word spacing themselves.
- If configuration is not offered, meet these minimums:
Case and alignment
- Case — provide the ability to display text in sentence case rather than ALL CAPS or all lowercase. One- or two-word labels are exempt.
- Alignment — text is left/right aligned per the player’s language preference (not centered or fully justified), or players can adjust it.