A typeface choice that can determine whether two letters look distinct is moving into San Diego's next Visual Style Guide. The city's Accessibility Advisory Board considered a draft response Thursday asking to participate in that review, bringing residents' lived experience and professional accessibility expertise into a decision that will reach websites, forms, notices and printed material.
The board's request follows a recommendation it approved in March: make Atkinson Hyperlegible the standard font for all city communications. Developed with the Braille Institute for readers with low vision, the typeface gives commonly confused characters visibly different shapes and uses open forms and generous spacing. Those details can reduce the work required to tell one letter or number from another.
The Communications Department did not accept an immediate citywide switch. In a May response, Director Nicole Darling said San Diego currently uses Open Sans and Merriweather. Both can comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines when size, spacing, contrast and document structure are handled correctly, the department wrote. The fonts are also embedded in city templates, digital systems, document libraries and departmental workflows.
That infrastructure makes a font change more than a search-and-replace exercise. A new default would have to flow through web components, slide decks, signs, letterhead, fillable forms and files produced by many departments. The department cited consistency and disruption in retaining its current primary fonts for now. For a resident, however, consistency only helps if the recurring format is readable on the device, printout or magnifier being used.
The city plans to update its Visual Style Guide later in 2026 and evaluate Atkinson Hyperlegible as a possible standard during that work. It also expects to add guidance on text size and spacing, color contrast, headings, lists, reading order and compatibility with assistive technology. That broader list is important because no typeface alone makes a document accessible. Small text, weak contrast or a broken reading order can defeat a well-designed letterform.
Thursday's draft thanks the department for placing Atkinson in the review and offers the board as a working resource. Its members say they can contribute lived experience and professional knowledge as the new guidance is evaluated. The draft does not demand that every city document change immediately. It asks that the people affected by low-vision barriers help test the rules before those rules become the next citywide standard.
The distinction between consultation and outcome remains open. The city's board webpage posted the September agenda and draft letter, but no September minutes or final signed response were available by publication time. The public record therefore shows that the board was scheduled to consider the language, not whether it approved the draft or what changes members made during discussion.
A useful review can move beyond comparing type specimens. The city can test realistic notices at common print sizes, forms on a phone, headings through a screen reader and strings where characters such as capital I, lowercase l and the numeral 1 can be confused. Publishing the test criteria and the board's role would let residents see how San Diego translates an accessibility principle into the ordinary documents they must read to use a public service.