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womble
Posts: 6007
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
Status: offline
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RE: Dyslexia and accessibility - 11/19/2008 6:34:49
An interesting read Dave - nice find!
I think the stuff covered in the third part of the article's good design sense anyhow, and relevant for all users - not just those with dyslexia/learning disabilities/visual impairments.
quote:
In summary, I think less emphasis on higher contrasts, lower contrasts for bold text and a slight reduction in the threshold for colour difference will result in pages that will be easier for dyslexic users to read but will not adversely affect the visually impaired or colour blind to any major degree.
With the stuff in part 2 though on backgrounds, the whole area's a minefield, because if you alter contrasts and thresholds to suit one particular group of users, unless you know what you're doing, you could adversely affect another group. Probably in general the recommendations they're giving are good, and cover most situations, but a catch-all term "visually impaired" doesn't differentiate between the wide array of different visual impairments users could have. Equally I think that before you get to the stage where you're tweaking contrasts and thresholds for colour differences, you need to pay attention to your colour scheme and the effect tweaking the different values could have on the end result.
I had a situation where I ran a page through one of the accessibility checkers (can't remember which one now, but it was one of the ones that checks the colour values) and by the time I'd finished making all the adjustments to the different colours that it recommended to get all of them in the "right" ranges, for those with "normal" vision etc., the end result was just  Admittedly though, that was one of the ones that follows W3C guidelines, and I tend to agree with the article that the W3C guidelines aren't suitable for all. In my experience, many people with special requirements use either their own stylesheets, screen filters, or software to view all web pages (and other apps) in a way that suits them best, and I think another important factor is not using anything in your stylesheets etc. that overrides the user's preferences for how they want a page to look.
One of the things the article mentions is that the alternative colour contrast analyser mentioned has a "high contrast warning", but a friend of mine has Usher syndrome, which means she has progressive hearing and vision loss. Her vision's now at a state where she has almost tunnel vision, but it also affects her colour vision, and can only clearly see pages on screen which are high contrast - in her case, yellow on black. Someone else though with the same condition finds black on yellow easiest. Neither of them would be able to make out a page such as the test one shown in the article as suitable for dyslexics and described as "not adversely affect[ing] the visually impaired." That's why I think you have to be careful using generalised terms like "the visually impaired", and also be careful not to override the user's preferences as well as using the general good design principles.
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mar0364
Posts: 3297
Joined: 4/5/2002
From: Florida, US
Status: offline
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RE: Dyslexia and accessibility - 11/25/2008 15:07:20
I was just in a class today on CSS and they mentioned to stay away from justifying text as it made reading difficult for the Dyslexic.
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“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”
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