Who's Al and Where's Webfont Legibility?

Have you heard about Al? Al is literally everywhere.

Who's Al?

• Al Guidance - How Al uses Al as a Senior Developer
• Al site builder, real time collaboration and more
• How AI (not Al) Remembers and Why It Forgets

So who is this Al guy?

Joke aside, here are some screenshots about ...

... "AI" not "Al" of course, but in most web fonts you can't visually tell the difference. You still can't. In 2026. Despite decades of accessibility awareness advocacy and legislation. We've made WCAG criteria mandatory, at least in theory. The 2025 European Accessibility Act followed prior US legislation. We await WCAG 3 and its APCA algorithm, but we still fail to use legible web fonts?

You can call me Al. Al uses AI. All AI Al's been using.

Just in case you haven't heard of Atkinson Hyperlegible. It's not a proof of concept but a popular webfont:

Ubuntu's default "Ubuntu" font provides slightly more subtle and elegant legibility. Here is an example where I added "(not Al)" to the original website for the sake of my point:

So, Nadia Makarevich's post about AI is already legible and unambiguous, unless my mobile mail box on Android displays it out of its original context:

Comments

[Willie Harris]

Interesting take on how “AI legibility” is starting to matter as much as human readability, but the real twist is that chasing both might actually push us back toward better, more structured web practices instead of worse ones 😄

[leob]

Paul (with an L) Simon !

P.S. there are languages (Arabic, Hebrew) where they only spell the consonants, not the vowels, you have to "guess" those - and Chinese with its 4000+ complicated characters does also not seem that "accessible" to me - so, in the grand scheme of things I think we can live with this slight ambiguity between "I" and "l" ...

(although I do agree it's pretty bizarre that uppercase i and lowercase L are indistinguishable in most fonts)

[Ingo Steinke, web developer]

Here's a screenshot of an English article by Arab news site Al Jazeera about their AI. Again, you can't distinguish AI from Al in the san serif Latin font.

[Ingo Steinke, web developer]

Yes, I actually thought of Paul Simon's song You Can Call Me Al when I wrote this. Arabs say their script isn't ambiguous at all - when you know the language! Any ambiguity can be resolved with otherwise optional accent marks that you'd use in school or for prayer just to be sure. So, Arabic does have a hyperlegible version in that sense as well.

[Victor Okefie]

The fact that "Al" and "AI" are visually indistinguishable in 2026 isn't a font failure. It's a failure of context. Designers assume readers will infer meaning from surrounding words. But when the surrounding words also contain "Al," the inference loop breaks. Atkinson Hyperlegible solves it. Most sites don't use it because they optimize for aesthetics over access. That's not a technical constraint. It's a prioritization problem.