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Dyslexia

Along with partially sighted users, this is perhaps the largest category of users where accessibility is important, yet commonly it is the least understood category. Furthermore, in the context of the University, dyslexia is often manifest as a learning difficulty and is therefore a particularly relevant category.

Dyslexia tends to be person specific and as such a concise definition of dyslexia is problematic. However, particularly relevant to web design is that dyslexia often involves patterns of thinking and learning which connect with the visual layout of information.

Rather than thinking in words, dyslexics often think in terms of pictures. As such, rather than a text-only web page, a dyslexic might tend to prefer a visually rich page layout which uses icons. In terms of barriers to accessibility, the following may be issues:

• Pages with many different font types, font colours and font sizes on a single page.
• Links from whole lines of text rather than from key words.
• Too many or too few characters on a line. Seventy (70) characters per line is thought to be an optimum line-length for dyslexics. Rather than restricting text to a line length, use a flexible design which allows the user to control line-length is preferred.
• Not being able to change the size of text.

Dyslexia might seem to impose many restrictions on web design. In practice, dyslexic accessibility issues often go hand-in-hand with more general usability issues. Some of these issues are addressed in the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

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Original pages: April 2001 by John Walsh
last updated: 01 January 1970 by Rachel Scudamore