Designing and Dyslexia

[Charles]

There's a good, and short, article on dyslexia and web design at http://www.madeforall.com/tutorials/dyslexia.html.

[Hester]

A good rule of thumb is to avoid serif fonts; they are scrappy and harder to read on the web.

Hello Charles...!

Dyslexic readers are particularly sensitive to the brightness of text on a pure white background. This can cause the words to appear to move around and to blur together. However a great number of web sites use dark text on white backgrounds. Better alternatives are the use of off-white colors for a background, to soften glare, but provide sufficient contrast between the foreground and background.

It always amazes me how websites offer must-do advice then don't use it themselves. The site uses black text on a white background! I can see no alternative stylesheets either.

[jeffmott]

It always amazes me how websites offer must-do advice then don't use it themselves. The site uses black text on a white background! I can see no alternative stylesheets either.In Opera and IE it renders with the text being a shade of blue ( rgb(0,101,156) ) and the background a shade of grey ( rgb(238,238,238) ). Netscape (Mozilla) does not render it this way, though. And, looking at the source Netscape is the one that rendered it correctly. The site has an oversight in their CSS, and that it renders as they intended in any browser is sheer luck.

[DaveSW]

I noticed in that article they have a link to this site
http://www.accessify.com/default.asp

which happens to have a few useful looking tools for accessible design.

[Hester]

Originally posted by jeffmott
In Opera and IE it renders with the text being a shade of blue ( rgb(0,101,156) ) and the background a shade of grey ( rgb(238,238,238) ).

I see using IE what you mean! A shame the text is too small when IE is set to Smaller (the default size). Could be the infamous 'em' bug again. (See http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2003b.html#t20030624) It actually splits up some of the headers.

I will try and mention these issues when I have been through their forum.

[Jona]

Originally posted by Charles
There's a good, and short, article on dyslexia and web design at http://www.madeforall.com/tutorials/dyslexia.html.


The article is pretty good. Thanks for the link! :)

[J]ona

[Robert Wellock]

I saw that article a long time ago and have commented on its generic approach on various forums, since my claim to fame is that I have dyslexia.

Well, I certainly know that I have no issues with reading italic text or certain font families displayed by computer screens, or fully justified paragraphs...

It was a very generic article; resulting in blanket covering a very complex disability, which is a collection of specific conditions, or syndromes that can vary quite dramatically between livewire entities.