Share Your Experience
Would you help developers understand the need to customize text for readability? We need your help if you have:
- low vision, including those with declining eyesight due to aging,
- dyslexia or related impairments,
- another conditions that impact reading.
Raising awareness
For about 10 years Shawn has encouraged the accessibility managers of a leading tool development company to include sufficient text customization functionality in their products. At CSUN 2012 the current manager said that he has heard from only two people of this need to format text — implying that it is not an issue for anyone else.
We need to better communicate requirements for text customization functionality!
How you can help
- Tell people about your need to format text. We can include your experiences on the User Experiences page. It can be just a couple sentences, or a whole web page. (More info in the next section.)
- Volunteer to participate in a study, listed under Current Studies.
For your user experience story
For this project I am focusing on readability, that is, reading a lot of text. I am not generally addressing other issues such as interacting with forms. (I am especially interested in sharing how people need to customize the leading/line-spacing and customize by styles/elements, e.g., making headings different from main text.)
You can share your story with your name, or anonymously.
You can write it up yourself, or we can talk on the phone and I'll draft it for your approval.
You can include:
- Description of your condition that impacts reading (low vision, dyslexia, other). Feel free to be as brief or as specific as you are comfortable with.
- Your text settings in your operating system, browser, etc.
- How you interact with electronic text. For example:
- How you set text in a Word document to make it easy to read.
- What you do with PDF documents.
- If you set text in user style sheets for browsing the web.
- What works for you and what doesn't.
- What you need that is not provided by current mainstream technology, such as PDF text customization, easier user style sheet implementation in browsers.
- Summary of above that is a couple or few sentences, to be included on the main User Experiences page, too.
Summary
Contact Shawn at +1-617-395-7664 or e-mail projects@uiaccess.com for more information.
Thanks!