Our design standard
Most websites about Medicare and Social Security are built by people in their thirties for people in their seventies, and it shows in the type size before it shows anywhere else. We wrote down the rules we build to, and then we published them, for two reasons: so you can hold us to them, and so anyone else building for older readers can take them.
Minimalism means restraint, never smallness. A quiet page is a good page: few colors, no clutter, one thing asked of you at a time. But somewhere along the way "clean design" came to mean thin grey type at twelve pixels, controls that only appear when you hover, and a contact link you need to hunt for. That is not restraint. It is the designer taking something away from the reader and keeping it. We spend our restraint on decoration and our generosity on type, spacing, and contrast.
1. Body text starts at 18 pixels, and nothing anywhere goes below 16
Ordinary reading text on this site is 18 pixels. Fine print, footnotes, table cells, captions, and legal text are 16 pixels at the very smallest. There is no exception, and no page has ever needed one.
Why: The eye focuses less easily with age, and by the sixties most people need noticeably more light and larger type to read as comfortably as they did at forty. Almost every website answers this with a 13-pixel disclaimer. Type that small is not a design choice; it is a decision that the sentence does not matter.
2. A, A+, A++ — a text-size control you can see
Three buttons in the header set the size of every word on the site, and the setting is remembered on your next visit. The largest step is a quarter again as big as the default.
Why: Browsers have had zoom for thirty years and most people have never found it. A visible control asks nothing of you except a look, and it scales the layout properly instead of magnifying the page and pushing half of it off the side.
3. High contrast is its own switch, separate from dark mode
A separate control pushes text to pure black on pure white, thickens borders, and underlines every link. It works in either color scheme.
Why: Contrast trouble and light sensitivity are different problems, and a site that bundles them into one dark-mode button forces you to accept one to get the other. Cataracts and glare respond to contrast, not to a color theme.
4. The site is light by default, and dark mode is something you turn on
We do not follow your device setting automatically. This site opens light, and there is a control to make it dark.
Why: Light text on a dark background is harder for most aging eyes to read, and many older readers have a system-wide dark setting they never chose — it arrived in an update, or a family member set it up. Inheriting that would hand them a harder-to-read site in the name of respecting a preference they never expressed.
5. Anything you tap or click is at least 48 by 48 pixels
Every button, link target, checkbox, and menu item on this site is at least 48 pixels square, with real space between neighbors.
Why: Hands shake, tremor is common, and a touchscreen is unforgiving. The accessibility guidelines set a floor of 44 pixels; we use 48 because the cost of the extra four is a little whitespace and the benefit is not tapping the wrong thing while holding a phone in one hand.
6. No carousels, no parallax, no motion you cannot stop
Nothing slides on its own. Nothing moves as you scroll. Nothing counts up, spins, or fades in as a decoration. What animation remains is short, and it turns off entirely when your device asks for reduced motion.
Why: A carousel moves the thing you were reading out from under you, which is irritating at thirty and disorienting at seventy-five. Motion tied to scrolling can trigger dizziness and nausea in people with vestibular conditions. None of it ever helped anyone find a number.
7. Nothing important is hidden behind a hover
If information matters, it is on the page. Tooltips explain terms; they never hold the answer, the footnote, or the source. Every definition can also be reached by tapping.
Why: Hovering does not exist on a phone or a tablet, and it is fiddly with a shaky hand or a trackpad. Information that only appears when a pointer rests on exactly the right word is information a lot of readers will never see.
8. Every page is built to be printed
Print a page and you get the content, the figures, the sources, and the date — no navigation, no advertisements, no buttons, in a size that reads on paper.
Why: People print these pages. They take them to the Social Security office, to a benefits counselor, to the kitchen table where a decision is actually made with a spouse. Printing is not a fallback for our readers; it is often the point, so the printed page gets designed rather than left to chance.
9. Plain language, and a reading level we measure rather than claim
Short sentences. Ordinary words. Every acronym spelled out the first time it appears on a page, however obvious it seems to us. Every written surface on the site is scored on each build, and a page that drifts past the ceiling fails the build rather than shipping.
Why: Nobody has ever been annoyed that a sentence was too clear. Plain language is not writing down to the reader — our readers are sharp, and many of them ran things far more complicated than this website. The system is what is complicated. Our job is to stop adding to it. This page used to say the writing aimed at a seventh-to-eighth-grade level, and that the level was measured. When we finally built the measurement, the median came out higher than that, so we changed the claim instead of changing the number.
10. Shallow navigation, with labels that say what they are
Menus are one level deep wherever possible, labels name the thing rather than a category we invented, and every page says where you are with a trail back to the top.
Why: Working memory is where hunting through nested menus gets expensive. A person who has to remember which of four submenus held the premium tables has already been asked to do more work than the page is worth.
What we ask of ourselves when the rules collide
Sometimes a rule costs something. Larger type means fewer words on a screen and more scrolling. Real spacing between buttons means a longer page. A table that stays readable at 18 pixels may need to scroll sideways on a phone. In every one of those trades we favor the reader who is struggling over the reader who is comfortable, because the comfortable reader loses a few seconds and the struggling reader loses the answer.
The one place we do not compromise is the type floor. If a sentence is too long to fit at 16 pixels, the sentence gets shorter. The type does not.
Please take this
None of this is clever and none of it is ours. It is mostly the accessibility guidelines, followed rather than nodded at, plus the specific things that go wrong when a reader is seventy-eight and the letter in their hand has a deadline on it. If you build anything for older readers — a hospital portal, a benefits form, a pharmacy site, a church newsletter — copy these rules, adapt them, argue with them. You do not need to credit us and you do not need to ask.
If a page on this site breaks one of these rules, that is a bug and we would like to know: tell us on the contact page. Our broader accessibility commitments live on the accessibility page, and how we handle the numbers themselves is on our methodology page.
Reading level measured, not claimed: median grade 10.3 across 66 written surfaces (Flesch–Kincaid), checked on every build. How we measure it, and what the measure cannot see.
The instrument is Flesch–Kincaid, which counts words per sentence and syllables per word and nothing else. It cannot tell a clear sentence from a confusing one, and it penalises the domain words a reader here actually needs. So we use it to catch drift — the sentence that grew a clause every time somebody edited it — and not as a target to write toward. The build fails above grade 14; the current worst page is 13.7.