Rights of access

A recent article in Wired on fonts for readers with dyslexia caught my eye. I'm not dyslexic so have no way of judging this objectively, but I find the text in Dyslexie easier to read than, for example, this open source alternative.  

Accessibility is something that, by law, any public sector organisation involved in publishing must take seriously: and the rest of you certainly should too. You won't always have the resources to get all of your documents translated or turned into Braille, for instance, but if you're publishing for the general public there are some basic things you can do to make your documents more accessible for readers with additional needs like dyslexia, or with levels of literacy that aren't as high as your own. For example:

• For on-screen documents, if you're publishing PDFs, a clickable table of contents based on XML heading styles (easily created in Word) helps visually impaired users with screen readers to navigate your document. Make sure headings have meaningful titles and follow a logical sequence and hierarchy.
• For websites, publish transcripts of any videos and podcasts, and include alt text for images. More information is available at W3C, but the best bit of advice I can give is to carry out extensive, iterative user testing before launching a site.

Just as many of the principles of good web writing also apply to good writing generally, so a lot of the advice for readers with dyslexia is helpful for those of us who don't have. For instance, this style guide from the British Dyslexia Association recommends large sans serif fonts with bold headings, no block caps, left alignment, bullet points, the active voice, and clear instructions given in short sentences without too many abbreviations or too much jargon. All of this stuff is good practice for effective written communication the rest of the time.