Accessibility Archives | Foundation Web Design & Development

“Fancy Fonts” and using unicode characters on social media

May 12, 2025May 12, 2025

If you’ve been on the web for a while, you may remember the MySpace days. MySpace, preceding Facebook, was a home where you could connect typical social media style with friends, but one of the key factors of MySpace was that your profile was a little home base you could customize to your heart’s desire… To a degree. You could place all kinds of cool code to give your profile a background image, or make it play a song when someone arrived at your profile. Users could concoct really unique experiences from profile to profile.

Places like Facebook, Twitter, and others homogenized the whole experience, and with good reason; really, no one loves to have Green Day blast at them when they open someone’s profile, and then wait five hours for all the moving and flashing animated gifs to load. Plus, all the ability to customize nearly fully meant MySpace profiles could be a vector for delivering malware, spyware, and more. Allowing users a small level of customization rather than a vast all-inclusive customization experience meant it was easier to browse as a whole.

Now, in 2025, we’ve got a whole lot of homogenized social media. It can be difficult to customize your profile or stand out in a crowd of many when almost all profiles look the same, barring the profile picture, header graphic, and actual copy.

Why did we go down this quick trip down memory lane?

Because today I’m going to be talking about “fancy fonts” in use on social media, what they are, and how they affect other users.

Accessible Marketing: Avoiding Mystery Meat in your Marketing Efforts

A loaf of questionable meat product cut into slices laid on a plate.

February 10, 2025December 9, 2025

You may be familiar with the concept of “mystery meat”: A “meat” product, usually some sort of salisbury steak or meatloaf type deal, usually served in American cafeterias. People usually don’t really know what’s inside this meal: they know it’s some sort of meat, but they can’t pinpoint what exactly just by looking at it. I’ve been referring to vague navigational beacons as “mystery meat navigation” for many years, thanks to a coining from an ancient website I believe was YourWebsiteSucks.com (I can’t seem to unearth it now; it could have been WebpagesThatSuck.com but I was pretty sure at the time it was more pointed than that). The same concept can be used to describe nebulous marketing concepts.

So, what is a piece of mystery meat in the marketing sphere, and how do we avoid it?

In website design, is there such a thing as too much contrast?

Smpte Color Bars with "too much contrast?" overlaid the top.

May 6, 2024December 9, 2025

By now, you likely have an idea about contrast ratios in web design and when a contrast ratio is too low, it might be difficult for people to read. A contrast ratio is a mathematical way of figuring out whether or not something is readable based on a few different factors, like text size and text color, as well as background color. Generally speaking, WCAG AAA contrast ratio for text is minimum of 7:1. You can use an online contrast checker if you’re unsure; WebAim has a good one! But what happens when the contrast is too high? Does such a thing exist? The short answer is: yes.