Capitalisation

Avoid capital letters

Yes, you want to make a point. There’s a word you (or your product person or even the client) want to highlight. You want to highlight a whole headline. The motto is “Make it big!”. And you make it bigger by using uppercase letters. Problem solved.

Wrong. You’ve just created a problem. People with dyslexia might have problems reading this text. It’s actually easier to read a text with all its “ups and downs”.

And it’s not only people who have a problem with uppercase letters. Some screen readers get confused by them as well. Let’s say you have “VERY IMPORTANT” on your page. They will spell each and every letter on its own. Although I couldn’t find this confirmed. VoiceOver, Narrator, NVDA, ChromeVox - all read “very important”. Maybe the did it in earlier versions ...

The best thing to do is to avoid uppercase letters completely. But if you have to use them (because your job is on the line or your boss is threatening to kill your parents), then tell your developers they should use CSS to do this. Don’t use uppercase letters in your markup. Just use something like this:

.blame-it-on-my-boss { text-transform: uppercase; }