Dyslexie - Font For Dyslexic People

All the common typefaces used these days have always been a problem for people with dyslexia because even though there are not many alphabets in the English language, quite many of them look similar, thus making reading difficult for dyslexic people. To make reading easier, Christian Boer of Studio Studio has created a new font called Dyslexie that makes changes to the structure of alphabets, punctuation etc., so that alphabets don't look similar, thus making reading easier and less confusing for dyslexic readers.

I contacted Christian Boer to get more information  about Dyslexia, and this is what I found out..

first of all, Dyslexia is not free. Currently, Christian is selling this font only in The Netherlands but soon plans to sell this font in other regions. It looks like he wants to sell to bigger groups (like schools, other organizations that focus on Dyslexia) instead of individuals to keep costs low (although his youtube page suggests that he wants to sell to individual users as well).

Watch the video to know more about Dyslexia, and how it would help Dyslexic readers.

You can contact Christian Boer here.

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iPad Helps Legally Blind Woman See

"...oh boy, what an eye opener, pardon the pun!"


Says Evelyn O'Brien, who has been legally blind for more than 30 years. She cannot see a person's face, but with the help of an iPad she can zoom in on pictures and see faces in great detail. This is how she was able to see her five children after more than 30 years.

Some argue that the kids could have bought her a PC with software for the visually impaired installed. But how convenient is it to carry a gadget everywhere and look at pictures whenever and wherever one wants to by just pinching in and out their fingers?

"Very", is what comes to mind.

Essentially, it can be any tablet (iPad, Motorola Xoom, Blackberry PlayBook etc.) that can help achieve this. All touch screen tablets allow zooming in and zooming out on pictures with your fingers. iPad makes the news because of apparent reasons - extremely popular; very affordable (starts at $499), and very easy to use.

Evelyn says she can see pictures/ videos, and surf the web on the iPad.

See these videos to know more about Evelyn's experience.

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You can read more about this story here.

Source: AOL, Obama Pacman

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Accessibility Video Tutorials For Websites

Think Vitamin Membership recently made all its accessibility tutorial videos free. Think Vitamin is a website for web developers, and has many video tutorials on the latest technology that web designers and developers need to know in order to design websites. The videos are available in different resolutions (including HD), and their tutorials are very easy to understand.

There is actually a membership cost to access their videos, but recently they made their accessibility tutorial videos available to everyone for free. The tutorial consists of  21 very easy to understand lessons. It starts with the fundamentals - some basic things to keep in mind while designing pages for people with not just low/no vision and hearing impairment, but also for those who have impaired mobility (e.g., make pages keyboard accessible). The videos are around 5 - 7 minutes long.


Here is the video that discusses designing web pages for people with impaired mobility (video 5/21):



Video #6 is about screen readers. This lesson is a quick primer on screen readers and how they tend to navigate and read content on a web page. They show a quick demo of a free and open source screen reader called NVDA (Windows only), and put emphasis on a very important point - screen readers read content based on markup, not visual presentation.

The rest of the videos show how to include accessibility features in forms, tables, dynamic elements, and graphs and charts.

Here are all the accessibility videos.

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Readability Made Easy In Firefox

Readability for people with low vision can be drastically improved by installing the Readability add on for Firefox. The Readability add on does two things. First, it gets rid of all the design elements present on the page that may be distracting. Second, it puts all the text in a single column, and gives quite many options that make the text very easy to read.
After the add on is installed, the user would see a little blue icon that looks like the letter "R". Left clicking the button activates Readability. The design elements of the page vanish, and the text shrinks in to one column. Right clicking on the "R" icon at the bottom right corner of the screen brings up a menu that allows the user to change the style, font size, and margin.
 
Here is an example.

The screen shot below is that of a Wikipedia page without Readability activated. This is how we all see this screen on our computer screens (click image to enlarge).

The text on this page looks extremely cluttered, and it may not be very easy for someone with low vision to read the entire article without getting frustrated. This is where Readability comes to their rescue!

Clicking on the "R" icon at the bottom makes the page look like this (click image to enlarge):

Notice that the only thing left on this page is the main text from the article, which is displayed in one column. The menu at the bottom lets the user choose the style, font size and margin. The screen shot above is the "newspaper" mode. The text can be enlarged up to 40px. The margins can be set from "Extra Narrow" to "Extra Wide", although I noticed that only "Wide" and "Extra Wide" really worked. Here is the menu (notice the "R" icon at the bottom):

(click image to enlarge)

Like I said, Extra Narrow, Narrow, and Medium did not really seem to work. Also, the 40px font size looks really good!

Here are screen shots of the other styles from the menu. My personal favorite is Athelas.

Novel (click image to enlarge):

eBook (click image to enlarge):

Inverse (click image to enlarge):

Aphelas (click image to enlarge):
 

In order to switch to "normal mode", the user has to click on the "Arrow" icon on the top left corner (click image to enlarge):

This menu can also be used to print the document, and email it to others.

One thing to note though is that this add on works only on pages that have a single article. I tried to use it on a page that had results of a Google  search, and I got this error (click image to enlarge):

I tried it on the main page of CNN's website too, and got a similar message (click image to enlarge).

I tried to proceed by clicking the link, but got the same error that I got for the Google search page. However, it worked great when I clicked on a headline and visited the main article (click image to enlarge).

One thing I should mention is that this page manages to keep images associated with the article, but gets rid of  videos.

All in all, Readability is a great add on, and people with low vision can take advantage of it to read text on websites sans the clutter, and unwanted elements.

Visit Readability to read more about it, and to learn keyboard shortcuts!

Update: A fellow group member on LinkedIn had this to say about Readability:

"This plug-in is quite useful for users of screen readers as they can now more easily ignore those extra links that get in the way of reading articles."

That's good to know :-). Thank you, David!

Source: Yahoo Accessibility Blog

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