ALL CAPS, ALL PROBLEMS

Make your library's website more accessible (and usable) one fix at a time.

All caps is one of those design choices that seems harmless. It might make a navigation menu look uniform. Maybe it makes a heading seem more important. Unfortunately, it can also make both of them significantly harder to read.

Here’s why

When we read, we tend to recognize familiar patterns very quickly. Lowercase letters have different shapes, with ascenders and descenders that make words visually distinctive. ALL CAPS REMOVES MOST OF THAT VARIATION. (See what I did there?) The words become more uniform, which can often make them more difficult to recognize.

Harvard’s Digital Accessibility Services specifically recommends avoiding all caps because it reduces readability, and notes that all-caps typography can be more challenging to read. For some people with cognitive, learning, or visual disabilities, you’ve made reading unnecessarily harder. Why would we do that?

All caps navigation is especially terrible

Navigation labels are supposed to be scanned rapidly. A user looking for Events, Research, or Contact Us shouldn’t have to spend time decoding EVENTS, RESEARCH, or CONTACT US.

One ALL CAPS word? Maybe not a huge deal. But your navigation doesn’t have one word in it, right? It has five, six, eight or more labels, all competing for quick recognition. Now you’ve made the entire menu harder to scan.

The same idea applies to headings. Headings exist partly to help people scan a page fast and understand its structure. Making them possibly harder to recognize works against the reason they’re there in the first place. (There are better ways to do headers; a post for another time, perhaps.)

Is all caps a WCAG violation?

Technically, no. There is no WCAG 2.1 success criterion that says you can’t use all caps. And this is where I think people sometimes get accessibility wrong. “It passes WCAG” does not automatically mean “this is a good, accessible design choice.”

WCAG is a baseline, not a catalog of every possible way to make something harder for people to use. All caps can make text more difficult to scan and recognize even though an automated accessibility checker will just ignore it.

So, yes, your ALL CAPS navigation may technically pass WCAG. I still want you to stop doing it.

A really easy fix

Simplest fix ever. Don’t use all caps. Ever. With only one exception: acronyms. Those should be all caps. But not your site’s headers, navigation or other text. This is a really easy win for not only users with some types of disabilities, but for literally everyone that uses the site.

Remember: Libraries are about providing information. If people can’t access our information, what are we even doing?