The audience for my poster is the portion of the Stevenson community that deal with or are negatively impacted by Dyslexia, in regards to accessibility of the Green Spring Review website. The Stevenson community involves students, faculty, parents, as well as art and reading enthusiasts interested in checking out student work.
The Do’s and Don’ts for this poster are guidelines as to how one can be the most effective in organizing and displaying information for users of the Greenspring Review that struggle with Dyslexia. To start off, using prompts, notifications and arrows will help direct the user where they are supposed to go in order to access desired information nestled in the website. A tool to help navigate the website more efficiently is the search box where the use of auto-correct and suggestions will appear to guide the reader through the site, the reader may not know what they are exactly looking for and this tool makes for easier accessibility of all the work published on the Greenspring Review site, rather than skimming through everything. A huge factor in displaying content for individuals with dyslexia is contrast; allowing users to change contrast between background and texts to whatever fits their personal needs has shown to have a positive impact. It is essential to “provide the eye with a noticeable difference between two objects in order to emphasize that they are distinct” according to the 5 Principles of Visual-Design in UX. In addition to contrast, using at least 1.5 line spacing between text is imperative so the text is separated to help with clarity and make it easier for the reader to not get lost in a sea of text. Like I outlined in the poster, the use of bullet points and numeral are also great site guides to efficiently organize information so readers can swiftly move through a clumps of information and be able to take the main points away. In order to successfully display information websites should not be rigid and one size fits all, that makes it quite hard to distinguish text lines as well as makes the site hard to navigate. In addition, for those who don’t know, using cursive, italic and San serif fonts make it twice as hard for someone with dyslexia to read because the words get jumbled together due to there not being a break between letters. This causes the blur effect in individuals, where “dyslexic readers see the text blurring or swirling”, making reading quite tiring due to the strain on one’s eyes (Typetisdale). Furthermore, the slightest thing like double spacing after periods also hinders reading ability due to the river effect, this happens “when large gaps occur within consecutive lines of text” hindering the ability to read fluently and accurately (Typetisdale).
The aesthetic choices I used in my poster were simple and fun to make it easy to navigate the information thoroughly. I put a main emphasis on organization being that it is absolutely imperative for my audience of dyslexic readers. I organized each Do and Don’t in boxes that are numbered and have bullets to make the information clear and concise with some visual appeal. In addition, the font choice was a big deal to make sure that my audience would be able to fluently read the information, in other words don’t use San serif or nautical fonts. Last but not least, each section is specifically concise and to the point with a visual to add more meaning to the text.
Experience, World Leaders in Research-Based User. “5 Principles of Visual-Design in UX.” Nielsen Norman Group, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/principles-visual-design/.
Typetisdale. “Fontasia: 6 Bad Practises That Affect Dyslexic Reading.” Fontasia, 10 Nov. 2012, https://fontasiastudies.blogspot.com/2012/11/6-bad-practises-that-affect-dyslexic.html.
Pun, K. (2016, September 2). Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility. Retrieved from https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/
World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience. “Usability 101: Introduction to Usability.” Nielsen Norman Group, www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/.