for every reader
accessibility
WordofTheDay.US is meant to be easy to read for everyone: on a phone in bright sunlight, with low vision, with dyslexia, or with colorblindness. Press the Aa button on any page to make the site fit you.
What you can change
- Look. Classic (the original cream and rust), Dark, Match my device (follows your phone's light or dark setting), High contrast light and dark, Dyslexia friendly, and three themes for colorblindness: protanopia and deuteranopia (red-green) and tritanopia (blue-yellow).
- Make my own. Pick your own background, text and accent colors. The page tells you the contrast ratio and warns you when it is under 4.5 to 1.
- Font. The classic serif, a clean sans, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic.
- Size and spacing. Text from 90% to 200%, plus line, letter and word spacing.
- Word links. Every word in a definition is a link. You can underline them so they are easy to find. On a touch screen, tapping a word shows its definition first, and a second tap opens its page.
- Reading ruler. A clear band that follows your finger or mouse and dims the lines around it.
- Read aloud. Your device reads the page to you, at the speed you choose.
- Reduce motion. Turns off the small fade-in animations.
What the site does for you
- Text on phones is never smaller than 14 pixels, and reading text is 18 pixels. Buttons and tabs are at least 44 pixels tall.
- Every built-in theme's text and link colors were checked at a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 or better.
- Meaning is not carried by color alone: selected items also get a check mark, a weight change or an outline.
- Everything works with a keyboard. Tab moves through the page, and Escape closes the settings panel and the small "!" source notes.
- The letters A to Z stay pinned to the bottom of a phone screen and scroll sideways.
- Your choices are saved only in your own browser. Nothing is sent to our server, and no account is needed.
Honest limits
Definitions, pronunciations and word histories come from other free services, and we show them as we receive them. The "On this day" text comes from Wikipedia. We keep checking pages on phones and fixing what we find, but we cannot promise every page is perfect.
Fonts: OpenDyslexic (SIL Open Font License) and Atkinson Hyperlegible, created by the Braille Institute (SIL Open Font License).