We realized we’ve not been addressing accessibility concerns enough at all with FA. According to this article, there are a potentially surprising number of folks with sight and hearing impairments:
- Blindness, low vision, and visual impairment represent 8.4% of the total world population.
- Disabling hearing loss represents 5.3% of the total world population.
So we decided to do something about it. We’ve been hard at work on Font Awesome 4.6.0, which has many, many accessibility improvements. Thanks to a tremendous involvement from the FA community, we’ve got lots of new goodies in this release.
What’s New in 4.6.0
- A new accessibility section in the FA documentation. This includes all the specifics of how to mark up your icons depending on how you’re using them. If you want to make your site icons usable by the most people, this is the place to start.
- Every FA icon example page now has a better, more accessibility-minded default block of code that users can copy and paste.
- A new accessibility icon category with 15 icons. We initially started with a set of common US disability access symbols, then expanded to others the FA community asked for. We’ll definitely keep adding to this category as more requests come in.
- Snapchat & Viadeo icons (Thank you for all the requests. Many, many more brand icons coming in FA 5.0!)
- A total of 23 new icons!
- See all the fixes and improvements
A few specific folks have been awesomely helpful in this release, including @dylanbarrell, @cptvitamin, @karlgroves, @truls, and @legobot. Seriously. Thank you.
The 4.6.0 release is the first steps towards a better, more accessibly Font Awesome. Please, please let us know your thoughts on the accessibility improvements and where we can get better.
Want to grab the latest version of Font Awesome? Head on over to fontawesome.io and pick yourself up a copy.
