I’ve always known that font choice is important, especially in early childhood settings, since those are the prime years for letter recognition and learning to read. However, I wasn’t always sure which fonts were actually best to use. The only one I really knew by name was Times New Roman, but I often felt like it wasn’t the most effective or child-friendly option.

This makes me feel a lot better because as educators we usually tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to give our students the best that we can but using already made materials can help put our efforts in more important areas.

I never realized how helpful this could be for me personally. If I missed a class and later reviewed the slides, I sometimes wasn’t sure what an image or graph was representing. Having clear alt text would make it much easier to understand the key message of the visual without needing additional explanation. It would also help if I wanted to explore an image further; especially one that caught my interest; by giving me enough context to know what I was looking at and why it mattered.