Blog Posts About: accessibility

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Our new course on Readable Videos (coming soon!) has prompted a lot of learning about how to display text that is readable, accessible, and effective. The course covers the best practices from graphic design and other disciplines.

In our research, I came across new reading systems that are fascinating. They may not be your best bet for Readable Videos, but you may find them useful in other parts of your life.

Speed Readers

What if you could read without moving your eyes to follow the words in a sentence? What if, instead, the words appeared, one at a time, in a single location? Let's take a look...

I used this free app by Spreeder to display the paragraph above in this format:

This is often referred to as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation or "RSVP". The format has been shown to increase reading speed, but may not be the best for comprehension compared to static text.

Other RSVP tools:

• AccelaReader offers a free web-based tool
• Outread is an iOS app that can be applied to web pages and documents
• Sprint Reader is an extension for Google Chrome

Bionic Reading

Bionic reading is a proprietary tool developed by a Swiss developer named Renato Casuut. His goal was to make reading easy by guiding the eyes through artificial fixation points.

What does that mean? I've used this free tool to convert the paragraph above into the form of bionic reading:

The big idea: Your brain has memorized most of the words you see. To recall the word and its meaning, you don't need to see the whole word. By bolding the first few characters, we can read in a slightly different way.

While there isn't definitive evidence that Bionic Reading is faster or increases comprehension, it does seem to work better for people with ADHD and/or dyslexia. More.

Dyslexia Font

Speaking of dyslexia, designer Christian Boer created a font called Dyslexie that is specially designed for people with dyslexia. It enhances the ease of reading and comprehension. Example:

As you can see, the blue typeface above is weighted differently. The letters have heavier bottoms and longer sticks, which is the straight part of a letter like "P".

These tools are not a solution for everyone. However, they provide a look at new approaches to something we can easily take for granted: reading. Your best bet is to experiment and see what works for you and your use cases.

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When we started publishing Common Craft videos in 2007, we learned a valuable lesson. Educators quickly requested versions of the videos with subtitles so that they could be more accessible, especially for those with hearing impairments. Since then, we've been diligent about using open captions in English for videos in our library.

Readable Videos offered another lesson. I recently appeared on a show called Instructional Designers in Offices Drinking Coffee (IDIODC). We talked about Readable Videos and what it means to create a video with no voice-over. The audience asked about the accessibility of Readable videos and this kicked off a bit of brainstorming. Since then, I've been learning and experimenting with ways to make Readable videos useful to as many people as possible.

Lessons Learned

Because Readable Videos require reading, we need to consider accessibility for those with visual impairments. The choice of color, for example, is important because of color blindness and color insensitivity. About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have color blindness or CVD (Color Vision Deficiency).

How to make a Readable Video More Accessible

Red-green color blindness is the most common form, so we want to avoid it in videos:

 

 

 

 

The contrast between colors is also a challenge. We want to use high-contrast colors that pop.

 

 

 

 

 

Avoid Using Color to Indicate Importance

It may seem logical to use color to indicate importance in a sentence. However, this is not as accessible as other options because the color may not be obvious to everyone. Consider this sentence:

- When you come to the end, you'll need to stop.

A more accessible version uses an underline instead of color, as color may not be visible to everyone:

- When you come to the end, you'll need to stop.

 

There's More to Learn

We are getting close to publishing a comprehensive online course on how to create professional, polished (and accessible!) Readable Videos. Stay tuned!

Just a few hours after we published our first production, I learned a valuable lesson about videos.  Someone posted a comment that said something like "This video is great, too bad a deaf person can't benefit from it." Not being experienced with video at the time, it had never occurred to us that most videos are not accessible to the hearing impaired and others.  

Since that time, we've learned about accessibility and that many organizations now require that videos be provided with captions.  For this reason, we recently had our complete library of videos captioned in English using the "open caption" format. 

Here's a sample:

Versions of videos with captions are only available to Common Craft members, who can embed and download them just like any other Common Craft video.  Learn about membership.