Day 17 Find a problem that might affect someone with dyslexia.

 Day 17  Find a problem that might affect someone with dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs a person’s fluency or accuracy in being able to read, write, and spell . Other activities may be affected as well – including spoken language, maths, memory and organisation. There can also be difficulties with auditory and / or visual perception. 

There are some common issues that people with dyslexia struggle with every day when interacting with web content.Reading text online can be a significant challenge for them.While Designing website following key points can take in consideration to make it accessible for everyone.

Changing the physical appearance of text

• select colours you find most helpful for both the text and background adjust the ‘font’ size or use the ‘zoom’ facility to increase or reduce letter size

• increase the spacing between rows – to 1.5 or 2 times

• choose a font that you are more comfortable with

Layout

Avoid justifying text as this creates uneven spaces between words and letters and generates more whitespace, which can be distracting for people who have dyslexia and visual stress. Instead, you can make sure that your text is aligned on the left hand side, so the right side is jagged.

It’s important to be mindful about how your paragraphs are laid out. Make sure that they are concise and short, as this is easier on the eye rather than seeing big blocks of text. Line spacing of 1.5 is also favourable, as this makes the text evenly spaced.

Try and make your sentences simple, direct and to the point. It’s also important to omit the double space at the start of each sentence. Again, this down to decreasing whitespace and it will help with the flow of the sentence.

Contrast of the document must be sufficient, too little and it makes it very hard to distinguish for those with dyslexia, colour blindness or learning difficulties. If possible, avoid colours such as green and red in your content as these colours cause difficulty for people who are colour blind.

Adding pictures and infographics is also a great way to help dyslexic readers. Images can be markers in the text, offer context and can explain procedures. For website accessibility, it’s also important to add Alt-Text in case the person reading your content is using screen reading software.

One last thing, remember to avoid hyphens and em dashes within your content, as this interrupts the flow of the sentence.

Coloured Backgrounds

Offering the option for the reader to have a coloured background can help the individual, especially if they have dyslexia and visual stress. By being able to change the colour to one that suits them, such as an off-white, blue or purple, this can help the individual focus on the text better, as a hard white can be disorienting and make the text harder to read.

Headings & Stressing Text

When you are emphasising text, avoid capitals, italics and underlining words as this makes letters hard to read. A better way to highlight text is to use bold. This is because it looks clearer and gives letters and words more contrast. Boxes and borders around text can also be a useful feature if you wish to stress on particular words.

Electronically Accessible Documents

Ensuring that a PDF file or any online electronic content is accessible has become increasingly important, since we get most of our information online these days. It’s integral to create a structured file format in Microsoft Word before you turn it into a PDF document. Try and stylise the document with headers and subtitles.

There are common technologies to help dyslexic with reading

Converting text to speech

Text-to-speech software reads text from a computer screen and is an efficient way to get information from text without needing to read it. Text-to-speech software is also a good way to proofread as incorrect words or spellings are often more obvious when heard. 

Scanning with Optical Character Recognition

You can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to scan typed or printed documents into text that can be read by your device. There are also many apps available for smartphones that can take a picture of a page and perform OCR to create a text version of the page which can then be spoken out and/or saved.

Reading pens are about the size of a marker pen and can be used to scan over a printed document and have it read aloud through a built-in speaker or headphones. Most reading pens also have an inbuilt dictionary so you can hear the definitions of words.