Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Accessibility Online Course

Medical Disabilities: Dyslexia

What is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that affects the language processing centers of the brain (it is not a vision problem).  It affects a large number of people, some of whom may not be aware that they are dyslexic – they may only know that they have a hard time reading compared to others around them.  Dyslexia does not equate to a lack of intelligence and dyslexic people can be very successful in life, but may struggle to learn from written resources.

Dyslexia is an "invisible" impairment, meaning that one cannot look at a person and tell if she or he has dyslexia.  Therefore it is important to recognize that far more people than you think could suffer from dyslexia.

How Does a Dyslexic Experience the Web?

As with many conditions, there is no single set of symptoms, but a common thread is having a hard time interpreting text on a page.  To a person with dyslexia, letters that seem distinct to others may appear the same, or letters may seem inverted such that a "b" is read as a "p" or vice-versa.  Some with dyslexia may see text jumping around the page, and some may read the right letters, but the letters will process out of order.  For this reason in particular, people with dyslexia have a hard time learning to spell correctly, and even harder time writing.

Web Accessibility for Dyslexia

There are several best practices for making website content as accessible as possible for people with dyslexia:

  • Avoid ornate fonts, which can be hard to process. Simple sans serif fonts are the best choices, especially for body text.
  • Avoid really small print, which is also hard to process.
    • With the college Drupal web toolkit, never use the 80% or 90% font sizes on body text – they should only be used on headings, and even then only when absolutely necessary.
  • Provide more spacing so that text is broken up and not in big clumps:
    • Break up long paragraphs into multiple short paragraphs (and long sentences into multiple short sentences).
    • When creating lists provide space between list entries.
      • With the college Drupal web toolkit, you can add space after every line by selecting the text of an ordered or unordered list and applying the "Normal" format.  This format is found on the first / left-most formats drop-down on the editor formatting bar.
  • Avoid unnecessary formatting, as this can actually interfere with comprehension:
    • Use italics, bold, etc. minimally, only where real emphasis is needed (and never use underlining, which is disabled in our Drupal web toolkit, as it is reserved exclusively for links).
    • Never use all capitals: text in all capitals is much harder for someone with dyslexia to read, as there is no longer any distinctive shape to each word and people with dyslexia rely on recognizing word shapes since recognizing individual letters is so difficult.  However, when words are printed in all capitals, most will look like prefectly rectangular blocks. Compare and contrast these two examples:
      • Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
      • IVAN ALLEN COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
    • Avoid centering text: centering a short title is okay, but avoid centering full sentences and never center an entire paragraph.  Even people without dyslexia can have trouble reading a centered paragraph since every line is starting at a different horizontal position.
  • Support text-to-speech and screen magnification tools, which are often used by people with dyslexia to help them read website content more comfortably and quickly.
    • Avoid using infographic images to convey workflows and other complex relationships:
      • Whenever possible, use standard HTML lists and tables to put information in plain text that text-to-speech readers can process.  That said, be sure you are using tables correctly, providing proper headings and only using them for connecting data to heading values (tables should not be used for plain lists).
      • If an infographic is still desired, also provide the same information again in plain text (using HTML lists and tables as applicable) so that those who cannot see or properly process the infographic have a second option.
    • Avoid using images to custom format a heading or other piece of text.  If you can't format a heading the way you want with the tools in our web toolkits, then you likely should not be using the formatting you had in mind.

Resources

Resources are provided as a courtesy and are in no way endorsed by the college or the institute