Inclusion Through User Choice — Smashing Magazine

We make a series of choices every day. Get up early to work out or hit the snooze button? Double foam mocha latte or decaf green tea? Tabs or spaces? Our choices, even the seemingly insignificant ones, shape our identities and influence our perspectives on the world. In today’s modern landscape, we have come to expect a broad range of choices, regardless of the products or services we seek. However, this has not always been the case.

For example, there was a time when the world had only one font family. The first known typeface, a variant of Blackletter, graced Johannes Gutenberg’s pioneering printing press in 1440. The first set of publicly-available GUI colors shipped with the 10th version of the X Window System consisted of 69 primary shades and 138 entries to account for various color variations (e.g., “dark red”). In September 1995, a Netscape programmer, Brendan Eich, introduced “Mocha,” a scripting...