Typographic Encoding

The practice of using typographic properties—such as font size, weight, color, spacing, opacity, and baseline shift—to encode non-textual information within written content. In accessibility contexts, typographic encoding is used to represent paralinguistic speech features in captions, allowing visual properties of text to convey loudness, pitch, emotion, and rhythm that would otherwise be lost. Research shows that different typographic mappings feel more or less intuitive depending on the speech feature being represented and the user's cultural and linguistic background.