Text is justified

Why it matters

Text stretched to line up with both margins gets uneven gaps between words, and on narrow screens those gaps can join into "rivers" of white running down the paragraph. Many people with dyslexia or low vision lose their place in text like that. WCAG lists it at level AAA, so Lumtera shows it as a tip rather than a failure.

Who it affects: People with dyslexia and other reading difficulties, low-vision readers who enlarge text, and anyone reading on a small screen — justified, tiny or all-capital text and underlines that are not links all slow reading down.

What Lumtera flags

Blocks and elements set to justified alignment in the content — an inline text-align: justify or the has-text-align-justify class, for example from the Classic block, a page builder or pasted HTML — that hold at least 100 characters of visible text. Short lines are barely affected and are left alone. When justified blocks are nested, only the outermost one is reported. Justification set by the theme's stylesheet cannot be seen in the content.

Check ID text-justified — use it to filter the content report or with wp lumtera issues --rule.

How to fix it in WordPress

Align the text to the left (or to the right in right-to-left languages) instead of justifying it. Justified text leaves uneven gaps between words that make paragraphs harder to follow, especially for people with dyslexia. This is a level AAA recommendation, not a requirement for AA conformance.

Example

<p style="text-align:justify">Every loaf is shaped by hand before sunrise, proved slowly in our cool cellar and baked in a wood-fired oven that has been burning since 1998.</p>

<p>Every loaf is shaped by hand before sunrise, proved slowly in our cool cellar and baked in a wood-fired oven that has been burning since 1998.</p>

How to check your fix

1. Update the post. The issue disappears from the Accessibility sidebar on the next check, and from the site report on the next scan.
2. Read the passage at 200% zoom on a phone-sized window. Text should be left-aligned, comfortably large, mostly in sentence case, and only links should be underlined.