Accessible Font Delivery 2025 — A web typography strategy that balances readability and brand

Web typography sits at the heart of brand experience, yet in 2025 tighter accessibility regulations and stricter LCP targets mean delivery strategy makes or breaks results. Designers must minimize FOUT/FOIT while preserving brand faces and respecting user settings such as reader modes or font scaling. This article outlines best practices that keep designers in control of font delivery.

TL;DR

• Maintain typographic tokens as type.tokens.json so weight, size, and line height stay systematic.
• Ship fonts as woff2 + variable by default, automate subset generation, and track licensing.
• Monitor LCP and INP impact with Performance Guardian.
• Honor accessibility levers such as min font-size and prefers-reduced-transparency.
• Store regulatory evidence inside Metadata Audit Dashboard to streamline reviews.

1. Typographic tokens and style guide

Token design principles

• In Notion style guides, note purpose, minimum character counts, and locale variants for each token.
• Load type.tokens.json in Storybook and review alongside the components.

Multilingual and variable font support

• When covering both Latin and CJK, split variable fonts into subsets and declare unicode-range.
• Apply the mindset from Multilingual Image Quality Audit to typography and validate proposals in every locale.

2. Optimizing font delivery

Build and cache strategy

fonts/
  brand-variable.woff2
  brand-variable-subset-latin.woff2
  brand-variable-subset-cjk.woff2

• Use subfont or glyphhanger to extract character usage and generate subsets.
• Serve with Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable and versioned filenames.
• Implement stale-while-revalidate in the service worker to keep text legible offline.

Minimizing FOUT/FOIT

• Default to font-display: optional, reserving swap for hero elements.
• Choose fallback system fonts with similar metrics to the brand face.
• Combine Placeholder Generator to keep hero imagery stable while fonts load.

3. Accessibility and regulatory compliance

Readability controls

• Add minContrast: "AA" to each token and raise alerts when background colors change.
• Cap letter-spacing at 0.12em and use it only when it improves legibility.
• Create an E2E scenario font-scale.spec.ts to verify components at 200% browser zoom.

Compliance evidence

• Register font licenses, scope, and refresh dates inside Metadata Audit Dashboard.
• Embed accessibility-review.md in PR templates and checklist every WCAG 2.2 item.
• Auto-generate font-audit-report.pdf for EU accessibility filings.

4. Performance metrics and KPIs

• font-performance.mjs validates font sizes and subsets post-build, failing CI if thresholds are exceeded.
• Configure perf-alert.yaml with LCP limits and automate Slack notifications.

5. Case study: B2B SaaS site

• Background: A brand refresh introduced new heading fonts; LCP worsened and sales received complaints.
• Action: Redesigned type.tokens.json, split subsets, revisited font-display, and improved caching with the service worker.
• Result: LCP dropped from 2.9s to 2.1s, and accessibility audits reported zero issues.

Summary

Fonts power visuals, readability, performance, and compliance. With token design and automated delivery, web designers can protect brand typography while keeping experiences fast and accessible. Review your font workflow today and start a continuous improvement loop.