Consider font-weight and font-family

[haltersweb]

1) font-weight:

• Minimum font weight for text to be readable is 400 (rely on the font-weight numbers rather than names like "regular" or "book")
• For very large text >24px you can get away with 300. But its contrast ratio minimum must be 4.5:1.
• See the second chart "Font Weight and Contrast" on my page about fonts here: http://haltersweb.github.io/Accessibility/font-sizing-and-contrast.html

2) font-family: Some custom fonts don't render so well on a PC. Also, browsers use poorer rendering engines than Adobe products. Therefore you should do a test in HTML and view in IE and FF on PC. Squint and see if it looks alright.

[yatil]

Note that we also want to limit the download size of every font we’re using. So normal, italic, bold and bold italic might be all we need. I think we don’t need to use thin (≤300) font weights.

[yatil]

From the meeting:

• WCAG 2.0 has no provision on less than normal text, so one could argue we can’t use it. (I don’t.) Or we need to have a larger color contrast to meet WCAG 2.0.
• Font with less weight will be ok on higher resolution (Retina) displays but can be harder to read on non-retina screens. We might be able to send the thinner font only to retina screens.

Best is to come up with a prototype and just test.

[shawna-slh]

Prototype and more discussion in https://github.com/w3c/wai-website-design/issues/52

I hope OK to close this separate issue. Please re-open if not. :)