I’m a big believer in reading original source material. For example, when Apple provided me, alongside only a handful of other outlets, with a statement regarding their decision to delay the “more personalized Siri” back in March, I ran the full statement, verbatim. I added my own commentary, but I wanted to let Apple’s own statement speak for itself first. It drives me nuts when news sites in possession of a statement or original document do not make the full original text available, even if only in a link at the bottom, and choose only to quote short excerpts.
With regard to today’s news regarding Marco Rubio’s directive re-establishing Times New Roman as the default font for U.S. State Department documents (rescinding the Biden administration’s 2023 change to Calibri), I very much wanted to read the original. The New York Times broke the news, stated that they had obtained the memo, and quoted phrases and words from it, but they did not provide a copy of the original.
The State Department has not made this document publicly available, and to my knowledge, no one else has published it. I have obtained a copy from a source, and have made it available here in plain text format. The only change I’ve made is to replace non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) with regular spaces.1
Please do read it yourself, and do so with an open mind.
It seems clear to me that The New York Times did Rubio dirty in their characterization of the directive. The Times story, credited to reporters Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, ran under the headline “At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke”, and opens thus:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity.
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
Rubio’s memo ran about 950 words. Here are the full quotes the Times pulled from it, consisting of just 56 words, aside from the memo’s subject line (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”):
“wasteful”
“radical”
“restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”
“informal”
“clashes”
“was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.”
“accessibility-based document remediation cases”
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.”
“generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony”
Rubio’s memo wasn’t merely “mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation”. That’s entirely what the memo is about. Serif typefaces like Times New Roman are more formal. It was the Biden administration and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who categorized the 2023 change to Calibri as driven by accessibility. I do not have access to Blinken’s memo making that change (under the cringe-inducing subject line “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin”), but it was first reported by John Hudson and Annabelle Timsit at The Washington Post, where they wrote:
The secretary’s decision was motivated by accessibility issues and not aesthetics, said a senior State Department official familiar with the change.
Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics. Going back to that 2023 story at the Post, they quote from Blinken’s memo thus:
In its cable, the State Department said it was choosing to shift to 14-point Calibri font because serif fonts like Times New Roman “can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities,” it said.
The bit here about OCR is utter nonsense, a voodoo belief. No OCR or screen-reader software in use today has any problem whatsoever with Times New Roman. That’s just made-up nonsense, and I’d like to see sources for the claim about “visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities”. I don’t think it’s true, and citing it alongside a provably wrong claim about OCR software makes me even more skeptical.
Rubio brings actual numbers to make his case, which is more than can be said for anyone I’ve found arguing that Calibri is somehow more accessible than Times New Roman. Rubio’s argument is alluded to in the Times’s article thus:
But Mr. Rubio called it a failure by its own standards, saying that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the department had not declined.
Here’s the full passage from Rubio’s memo:
And although switching to Calibri was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA (see, e.g., Executive Orders 14151, 14173, 14281, and Memorandum on Removing Discrimination and Discriminatory Equity Ideology From the Foreign Service (DCPD202500375)) it was nonetheless cosmetic: the switch was promised to mitigate “accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities,” and employees were promised, “Your adoption supports the Department’s commitment to create a more accessible workplace,” but these promises were false. In fact, the number of accessibility-based document remediation cases at the Department of State was the same in the year after adopting Calibri as in the year before (1,192 cases in FY2024 versus 1,193 cases in FY2022). And the costs of remediation actually increased by $145,000 in that period — nearly a 20% jump. Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the Department’s official correspondence.
2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.2 (His memo even explains, “Fonts are specific variations of a typeface.... Through common use, the word font has come to mean both typeface and font.”)
The memo, per State Department standards perhaps, uses two spaces after sentences and colons. In the original copy I received, those double-spaces were sometimes in the sequence NON-BREAK-SPACE + SPACE, and other times the other way around: SPACE + NON-BREAK-SPACE. There were also a handful of seemingly random non-breaking space characters between words, mid-sentence. All of them, I suspect, just invisible-to-the-eye detritus from Microsoft Word. I replaced all of them with regular spaces, preserving, in plain text, two spaces wherever two spaces were intended. ↩︎
Do I think it was “fair and informative” to describe all of the Biden State Department’s DEIA initiatives as “illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful”? No. Did I bother reading any of the documents Rubio referenced as proving such? No. Do I think this particular memorandum, specific to changing State’s font back to Times New Roman, would have been stronger without that line, leaving his defenestration of the Calibri font change to speak for itself? Yes. But that line was just one aside in an otherwise focused, sober, and, yes, fair and informative memo. ↩︎︎
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