Large-Print Puzzles: Why Size Matters
What large print really means for puzzles, why most puzzle books get it wrong, and how to get genuinely comfortable type.
Reading a paragraph is not solving a grid
Standard large-print guidance is written for prose — but puzzles are harder on the eyes than prose. A word search asks you to scan hundreds of isolated letters; sudoku asks you to distinguish a 6 from an 8 in a crowded grid at a glance. Puzzle type needs to be bigger than book type, with more space around every character.
That's why 'large print' puzzle books so often disappoint: the title is large print; the grid is not.
What we do about it
- Three text sizes on every page, up to very large indeed — press the biggest 'A' in the header and everything grows, grids included
- High contrast throughout: near-black letters on warm cream, never grey on grey
- Printables with grid squares around a centimetre and a half — room to write, room to read
- Serif numerals in the sudoku that keep 1, 7, 6, 8 and 9 clearly distinct
Small extra comforts
- Good light from the side beats bright light from behind the screen
- On tablets and phones, the device's own zoom (in accessibility settings) stacks happily with our text-size buttons
- For paper puzzles, a soft pencil (2B) writes darker with less pressure than a biro