Accessible Font Pairings for the Web: A Practical Guide

Pick the wrong fonts and you quietly lose people: visitors skim past your content, conversions drop, and legal risk creeps in. Pick the right ones and reading becomes frictionless. This guide gives you the exact thinking, quick checks, CSS snippets, and A/B tests you can use right now to make your headlines and body copy work for everyone.

I write for marketers who care about brand and performance. That means usable rules, not design school pontification. Read this over coffee, paste the snippets into your dev environment, and run a couple of fast A/Bs. You’ll see the difference.

Why font pairing matters more than you think

Typography isn’t decoration. It’s an interface. The fonts you choose decide how quickly someone understands your headline, whether they follow your argument, and if they bother to fill out that form.

Accessible font pairings do three things:

Reduce cognitive load (people read faster).
Increase trust (readable content reads like it was made for humans).
Protect you from avoidable WCAG and Section 508 pitfalls.

A quick fact to keep in your back pocket: WCAG 2.1 AA requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. That’s color, yes — but hierarchy and weight matter too.

The basics: legibility vs. readability (and why both matter)

Legibility = can you recognize glyphs (is that a capital I or a lowercase l?). Readability = can you consume paragraphs comfortably for minutes at a time.

For headings, you can lean into distinctive letterforms (a slightly decorative serif, a bold display face). For body text, stick to high x-height sans-serifs or very open serifs with clear apertures.

What to look for in body fonts:

High x-height (letters like a, c, e are taller).
Open apertures (those inside spaces aren’t tight).
Neutral, consistent stroke widths (no extreme contrast).
Good kerning and predictable letter shapes.

Examples that work well together (real-world, easy to test):

Merriweather (serif) + Open Sans (sans)
Georgia (serif) + Verdana (sans)
Abril Fatface (display serif) + Lato (sans)

Contrast and hierarchy: more than color contrast

You can’t cover bad type with good color. If your body text is 14px light gray on white, even a 4.6:1 color contrast might feel thin and cause eye strain. Hierarchy isn’t just font size—it's weight, letter spacing, and the visual "heft" of the face.

WCAG tip: For headings considered “large text” (≥18pt or 14pt bold), contrast requirements relax to 3:1. But don’t use that as an excuse to make small type and rely on slight color differences.

Practical rules I use on client sites:

Body: 16px baseline, 1.5 line-height.
Headings: scale up using a type scale (1.25–1.33 multipliers) and increase weight, not just size.
Don’t reduce letter spacing on body copy—if anything, loosen it a hair for long paragraphs.

Line length, spacing, and rhythm

Optimal line length: 45–75 characters (including spaces). Too short and the reader keeps jumping lines; too long and they lose their place.

Set line-height at about 1.4–1.6 for body text. For small screens, drop the line length by narrowing max-widths rather than shrinking font size. Responsive typography matters: the same 16px looks different on a 6" phone vs. a 27" monitor.

A tiny micro-moment: the thing that stuck with me on one site audit was how a client’s 110-character lines made their blog look dense even at 18px. Shrinking max-width to 680px and keeping 16px text lifted engagement within a week.

Dyslexia-friendly considerations (yes, this matters for marketers)

Around 10% of people have dyslexia. Certain fonts and layouts help.

Good habits:

Avoid condensed, script, or decorative typefaces for body text.
Prefer fonts with distinct letterforms (think: clear difference between b/d/p/q).
Use heavier-weight bottoms (slightly weighted bases make letters less likely to flip in perception).
Increase line-height and letter-spacing slightly when testing for dyslexia.

OpenDyslexic exists and helps some users, but in my experience—and echoed by several user reports—often the layout changes (spacing and line-height) produce bigger gains than swapping to a specialty font. A clean sans like Verdana, Tahoma, or Lato plus 1.6 line-height and slightly larger size will usually outperform decorative options.

Language fallbacks and font stacks: don’t trust the network

Always provide robust font stacks so your site remains readable if web fonts fail to load. Also consider multilingual needs: some fonts don’t support Cyrillic, Arabic, or CJK characters. Plan fallbacks by script.

Example stack: font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

If Open Sans doesn’t load, the browser falls back to Arial or Helvetica—both reliable, readable system fonts.

Performance note: limit yourself to 2–3 font families. Each weight and style adds to the payload. Use variable fonts where possible to reduce file sizes.

Downloadable CSS snippets you can copy-paste

Use these as starting points. Tweak line-height, letter-spacing, and sizes for your brand.

Georgia + Verdana (classic, robust)

h1,
h2,
h3 {
  font-family: 'Georgia', 'Times New Roman', serif;
  font-weight: 700;
}

body,
p,
li {
  font-family: 'Verdana', 'Arial', sans-serif;
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 1.5;
  letter-spacing: 0.01em;
  max-width: 68ch; /* roughly 45-75 characters */
}

Merriweather + Open Sans (modern readable)

:root {
  --base-size: 16px;
}

h1 {
  font-family: 'Merriweather', Georgia, serif;
  font-size: calc(var(--base-size) * 2.25);
  font-weight: 700;
}
h2 {
  font-family: 'Merriweather', Georgia, serif;
  font-size: calc(var(--base-size) * 1.5);
  font-weight: 700;
}

body {
  font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: var(--base-size);
  line-height: 1.6;
  max-width: 70ch;
}

Arial + Helvetica (lean and safe)

h1,
h2,
h3 {
  font-family: 'Arial', 'Helvetica', sans-serif;
  font-weight: 700;
}
body {
  font-family: 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif;
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 1.5;
}

Quick checks you can run in 15 minutes

Contrast: Run your headline and body colors through WebAIM’s contrast checker. Aim for 4.5:1 for body copy.
Line length: Inspect the main article container—if it's wider than ~900px on desktop, reduce max-width.
Load simulation: Turn off web fonts in dev tools and make sure your page still looks readable and consistent.
Dyslexia spot-check: Give a short article to 3–5 people with varying reading preferences. Ask them to read aloud and time them. Small samples reveal big issues.

A/B tests that actually move metrics

Treat typography as CRO, not decoration. Don’t guess—measure.

A/B ideas to run:

Test A: Current type system. Test B: Increase body size by 2px and line-height by 0.2. Measure time on page and form completions.
Test A: Current serif/sans pairing. Test B: Switch body to a high-x-height sans like Open Sans or Lato. Measure scroll depth and completion of CTAs in long content.
Test A: Two-font system. Test B: Swap to a dyslexia-friendly variant with more spacing. Measure bounce rate and session duration for article pages.

Example result to expect: I worked on an e-commerce landing page where a 2px increase in body size and 0.15 line-height bump raised add-to-cart rates by about 3–4% after two weeks. Small changes, measurable impact.

Real story: how a font change stopped a rollout trainwreck

A few years back I inherited a product site redesign two weeks from launch. The design team had selected a thin, elegant sans for headlines and a light-gray body weight for copy. The devs were stretched thin and accessibility testing hadn’t been scheduled.

I ran a quick contrast test and found several pages failing WCAG AA for body copy. The marketing lead pushed back—brand guidelines were at stake. We did a rapid A/B: original vs. the same fonts but darker body color and slightly larger size. The darker, bumped version beat the original across the board: lower bounce, higher scroll depth, and fewer accessibility complaints from beta testers.

Lesson learned: brand aesthetics matter, but the user’s ability to read comes first. We adjusted the brand palette to keep the tone while meeting contrast needs. The launch stayed on schedule, the legal team slept better, and conversions rose 3.5% in the first month.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Too many custom fonts: kills performance and accessibility. Limit to 2–3 families, use variable fonts.
Decorative body fonts: beautiful for posters, terrible for copy. Keep decorations to display text.
Relying on color alone for hierarchy: size and weight should guide the eye, not just hue.
Ignoring non-Latin scripts: if you run a global site, test Cyrillic, Arabic, and CJK fallbacks.

Tools I use and recommend

WebAIM Contrast Checker — for quick WCAG verification.
FontPair or FontPair.co — to generate reasonable Google Font combos.
Figma Mirror — to preview typography on real devices.
Type Scale — to build a harmonious, accessible scale.

Final checklist before you ship a font system

Do headings and body meet contrast requirements? (4.5:1 normal, 3:1 large)
Is max line length between 45–75 characters?
Do fallbacks preserve serif/sans role and script coverage?
Are you using no more than 3 font families? Prefer 2.
Have you run at least one A/B test that measures engagement or conversion?

Closing: accessibility is a growth lever, not a compliance chore

Accessible fonts are one of the highest-impact, lowest-friction ways to improve UX and conversion. You don’t need to overhaul your brand to do this—small, measured changes (better contrast, slightly larger body copy, sensible fallbacks) are often enough to move the needle.

Start with the snippets above, run quick usability checks, and A/B the obvious changes. If you treat typography like part of your conversion toolkit, your users — and your metrics — will thank you.