Accessibility in Book Design: Easing the Way for Readers Hope Levy Typography, Layout, and Production
A Small Summary
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n book design, one of the essential roles the designer plays is invisibly creating a smooth reading experience.
However, mainstream publishing today needs to strive more to be accessible to all readers, not just the general populace. Individuals with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and visual impairments are not properly served by mainstream publishing. Publishers can help serve an underrepresented portion of the population today that struggles to access the simple joy of reading a book. Through using dyslexia-friendly fonts, consistent numbering, and ensuring their ebooks are compatible with audio programs, publishers can make books more accessible for all.
Gaterud
Accessibility in Book Design: Easing the Way for Readers Hope Levy Typography Gaterud 02/28/2017
Introduction
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n book design, one of the essential roles the designer plays is invisibly creating a smooth reading experience. The choice of spacing, size, and letter forms all influence the overall ease of reading for the average consumer of printed books. However, mainstream publishing today needs to strive more to be accessible to all readers, not just the general populace. Individuals with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and visual impairments are not properly served by mainstream publishing. There are ways book designers can make their designs accessible to more people. Font choice, spacing, ebooks, and audio compatibility all can help create a book design that is more inclusive for everyone. If mainstream publishing chooses to adopt certain practices, or make their books available for modification to become accessible, publishers can help serve an underrepresented portion of the population today that struggles to access the simple joy of reading a book. Through using dyslexia-friendly fonts, consistent numbering, and ensuring their ebooks are compatible with audio programs, publishers can make books more accessible for all.
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Graphic Representations
Graphic of the visual effect of dyslexia from Cure Adult Dyslexia.
Graphic of the visual effect of dyscalculia from The Tab.
Representation of the tunnel vision effect from Rebuild Vision.
Representation of blurry vision from Fayetteville Vision Development Center.
Graphic of the visual effect of dyslexia from the DEMOS Project. 3
Accessibility for Dyslexia
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ne group of individuals who would benefit from increased accessibility is those with learning disabilities like dyslexia and dyscalculia. Dyslexia is defined by the International Dyslexia Association and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) as “...characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities...Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and [a] reduced reading experience.” For many, this learning disability leads to a struggle to understand words on a page. It takes longer to read, and frequently, letters are flipped, swapped, and rotated in the dyslexic readers’ eye. Spacing also plays into reading difficulty for many with dyslexia. Luz Rello and Ricardo Baeza-Yates conducted a study in 2013 using eye-tracking technology to assess how dyslexic readers interacted with different fonts. This studied the readability of multiple fonts, including both serif vs. sans serif, monospaced vs. proportionally spaced, and roman vs. italic letters. The study found that “sans serif, monospaced, and roman font types significantly increased the reading
A table from Luz Rello displaying the median, mean, and standard deviation for the reading time and fixation time for multiple fonts (Rello 5). 4
performance, while italic fonts decreased reading performance” (Rello 7). Their study recommends the fonts Helvetica, Courier, Arial, Verdana and Computer Modern Unicode as having a high readability and a preference from participants in the study. These fonts are frequently used in mainstream society, simple to read, highly accessible for designers, and should be taken into consideration for font choices when designing a book. Attempting to incorporate these fonts may lead to an easier reading experience for all. However, none of the above fonts were specifically created for individuals with dyslexia. In the past decade, multiple graphic designers, a few of which have dyslexia themselves, have created various new fonts designed to be easily read through individualizing each letter to create a smoother reading experience. This is done in part by creating larger openings in letters like “c” and “e,” as well as varying the thickness to make each letter distinct. Part of the challenge with typography and dyslexia is that many fonts have a high similarity in letterform. When you look at a “b” next to a “d,” they look like mirror reflections of each other. In many cases, they virtually are. Designers creating dyslexia-friendly fonts are trying to change that. One such font, Dyslexie, was created by Christian Boer, and utilizes nine main features to make each letter individualized. First, each letter has a heavier weight on the bottom, to emphasize the direc5tion and stop the letter from flipping over. Boer also slanted parts of mirror letters, so they would appear more distinctive. In Dyslexie, the “b” and “d” are drawn differently.
The font also has larger openings between letters, slanted lines, longer ascenders and descenders, bolded capital letters, a higher x-height, and wider spacing to accommodate particular issues in reading Boer faced in his own life. Dyslexie was designed orig-inally as a final thesis project in 2008, and was created by first design-ing each letter as a 3-D object before converting it to 2-D. Boer made the font free for personal use in 2014. Multiple universities have done studies based on this font, and the University of Lille produced a paper in 2015 stating “Concerning reading aloud, the adjusted font results in a decrease in the error rate” (Someran 15). The University 5 of Twente has also conducted similar studies.
A popular book series that uses the Dyslexie font is Here’s Hank, written by Henry Wrinkler about a boy with dyslexia, from Penguin Random House. Boer also helped create Dyslexicbooks.com, which partnered with Read How You Want to print previously published books on demand in a more accessible format for readers. This company works with established publishers to make their books more accessible to more readers, online and in print. Companies like this are still new, but striving to make reading accessible for children and adults alike.
Examples of Dyslexie font’s heavy bottom weight, slanded spapes, and open spacing.
Examples of Dyslexie’s slanted lines, elongated ascenders and descenders, and bold capital letters and punctuation.
Examples of Dyslexie’s varied interior angles, heightened x-heights, and expanded spacing.
Other designers have striven to create more accessible fonts for dyslexia as well. One is OpenDyslexic, designed by Abelardo Gonzalez, which is an open-sourced free font, which focuses on heavier weighted bottoms and unique letter shapes. This font is available for commercial use, but is constantly being updated and changed with improvements. Another is Read Regular, created by Natascha Frensch in 2003, which also focuses on individualized letter forms, and has three fonts 6
in the typeface: Read Regular, Read Smallcaps, and Read Space, for different needs. Publishing House Zwijsen in 2012, as well as the children’s publisher Chrysalis adopted this font. More companies have started exploring the possibilities of accessible typefaces for people with dyslexia, and it is gaining attention and momentum. The tools to make design more accessible have already been created. It is now a question of whether mainstream publishing chooses to adopt them or not.
Capital and lowercase letters in the OpenDyslexic font.
Examples of Read Regular’s font features and individualized letter forms. 7
Accessibility for Dyscalculia
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nother difficult, if less well-known, learning disability is dyscalculia, which is a brain-based condition that makes it hard to make sense of numbers and numerical symbols. This is often diagnosed in conjunction with dyslexia and ADHD, and there is much less research done on dyscalculia independent from issues around dyslexia. As such, there are not as many specifically created tools for dyscalculia in book design. However, some aspects of dyscalculia translate into design if the book in question has a large amount of numbers, like academic and educational texts. In her graduate thesis, Renee Newman describes that “...when writing, reading and recalling numbers, these common mistakes are made: number additions, substitutions, transpositions, omissions, and reversals. Is almost always unaware of these mistakes. Similar mistakes with letters are rare” (Newman 6). In her research, she included letters and emails sent across the country from individuals with dyscalculia. One such person, Eva, wrote, “I understand math. I can calculate. Geometry and algebra are favorites. I just can’t read the numbers - or hear them, remember them and write them down” (Newman 41). One potential way to assist those with dyscalculia in design is to make the numbers more distinctive and consistent. Proportional oldstyle is frequently used in design, and helps create a distinctive style that sets the numbers apart from the height of the text. Something to additionally consider is increased spacing in highly numerical sections of text. As in the fonts designed specifically for individuals with dyslexia, adding additional spacing between numbers may help differentiate the figures and lead to a higher comprehension for individuals with dyscalculia. One behavioral study, written by Petra Vetter, Brian Butterworth, and Bahador Bahrami, stipulates that individuals with dyscalculia are more likely to pay attention to smaller sections of numbers (9). Knowing this may help designers in how they lay out pages when there is a bulk of figures and glyphs. If there is a way to 8
indicate a more transparent separation of independent figures, this may help in book design for those who have dyscalculia. While there have not been tools specifically created to help with printed book design and dyscalculia, multiple researchers have written on how online and mobile design can assist with dyscalculia. Most of these tools are related to interactive games, quizzes, and math problems. However, the dynamic capabilities of the internet allow for a faster access to accessibility tools. Options like changing a web browser’s font, adding in audio playback, and changing the size and spacing of letters and numbers are all options on various web extensions, and can help enhance people’s comprehension of the numbers. Andrew Sears suggests avoiding tight spacing on websites, maintaining consistent design standards throughout a page, and highlighting critical figures (120). While his book is specifically on web design, these concepts can also be translated over to printed design, as well as design for ebooks. Ebooks themselves are a potential avenue for a higher accessibility rate, as they can be modified by the users to appear in a more legible format for their personal needs. If mainstream publishing can strive to make sure their ebooks are available with accessible options, this could be a way to serve those with dyslexia and dyscalculia.
Screening questions to determine if an individual has dyscalculia from Humans not Robots. 9
Accessibility for Visual Impairments
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ne of the most notoriously underserved portions of the reading population is those with visual impairments. Ranging from mild visual impairments, like needing reading glasses, to loss of sight, individuals with visual impairments can struggle to understand the words on the page. Mainstream publishing frequently does very little to accommodate those who have visual impairments, and books in braille are often high in price and difficult to find commercially. The increasing popularity of audiobooks has helped many be able to gain access to content that was previously unavailable, but there is more that can be done to make books more accessible to those with visual impairments, particularly with image-heavy texts. Assistive technologies have been created for use in education in particular. These are primarily digital, and have “...helped to overcome barriers to learning through, for instance, audio descriptions of books and art works, enlargement or recoloring of text on screen, and the representation of sound as text” (Hayhoe 8). However, access to this software is not guaranteed, and is not economically viable for many who are partially sighted or blind. Hayhoe argues that assistive technology should be transformed into inclusive technology, or “mainstream technology that can be used with either no or minimal adaption by a person with a disability as an accessible technology. It is also seen as technology that provides social inclusion, such as communication and interaction, for people with disabilities” (12). Publishers should strive to ensure their books are inclusive, both in print and online. While financial considerations can play into spacing, leading, and font size, designers should consider how these choices affect those with partial sight. Again, ebooks allow for more flexibility in this realm, but that does not mean print design should completely dismiss the needs of the visually impaired in the assumption that technology will be enough. One issue with pre-existing accessibility concerning visual impairment is the time between the original publication and large print or 10
braille versions of books. While ebooks are now frequently released on the same day as the print book, the large print and braille versions can take anywhere from three months to a year to be printed and distributed. Maya Haynes, a visually impaired writer, wrote “the gap still very much exists when it comes to producing and accessing audiobooks or Braille copies of popular books...For friends of mine who only have the choice of audiobooks or Braille formats the wait can seem endless. I even know of cases where friends have had difficulty getting textbooks adapted, as there is not an audiobook equivalent or alternative, and a specialist Braille embosser must be used to translate from print to Braille; this can take weeks, and so in turn can leave them behind in their education” (Haynes 1). In addition, most books are not produced in audiobook, large print, or braille. According to a study by the Royal National Institute for Blind People, “only seven percent of books are available in large print, unabridged audio and braille, including titles available in these formats as eBooks” (RNIB, 2011b). Maya had to wait six months for a large print copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, one of the most highly anticipated and publicized books in the last decade. One way designers can help improve accessibility is campaigning for more books to be produced in formats people with visual impairments can read.
Graph of New York Times bestsellers in large print by press from The Gale Blog. 11
Inclusive and Universal Design
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nother way of looking at accessible design is by considering the benefits of inclusive or universal design. Universal design is defined as “a new paradigm based on the assumption that objects, services and environments should be designed in an accessible and usable way for everyone, not only for users with disabilities, so that there is no need to intervene in retrospect for the removal of barriers� (Guglielman 83). In terms of book design, this means we should strive to make accessibility the norm, not the exception. Striving to make books universally available should be a goal for mainstream publishing. As an industry created to compile and distribute information, it should be considered a responsibility to make sure that information, whether it is stories, textbooks, or dictionaries, can be distributed to as many people as possible. Every aspect of a book design is a conscious choice, and if designers keep the ideals of universal design in mind while making those choices, they could potentially significantly improve the reading experience for part of the population that has to work harder to read. While universal design is not a requirement, or completely possible for most designers today, maintaining the idea as a goal may help incorporate more inclusive practices into everyday design decisions.
Infographic of the 7 principles of Universal Design from the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design. 12
Conclusion
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any methods already exist to make design more accessible for individuals with learning disabilities and visual impairments. It is simply a question of if the publishing industry chooses to utilize those tools to the fullest of their capabilities. Either choosing specifically designed typefaces or selecting ones proven to be easier to read for those with dyslexia can make a significant difference in some’s reading experiences. Designers should carefully consider spacing and leading, as well as what figure styles they use, both in print and ebook formats. Ebooks in particular are a powerful tool for accessibility, as are extensions on the internet, assistive technology and audiobooks, particularly for those with visual impairments. While these may not be in a book designer’s control, keeping these options in mind while designing a book can enable a more inclusive design. While creating designs that are universally inclusive is not common or financially feasible today, that does not mean designers should not strive for that goal. Normalizing accessibility can allow for an improved reading experience for people who are not served by the majority of the industry, without the stigma and shame some feel associated with seeking out accessible books. Many in the publishing industry joined because of a fundamental love for reading, and a desire to communicate that love with others. How better to communicate that desire than to ease the way for readers who struggle to access the very thing we love?
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Works Cited “About Us - Dyslexic Books.” About Us - Dyslexic Books. Dyslexic Books, 2016. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. “Blurry Vision” Fayetteville Vision Development & Rehabilitation, 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Boer, Christian. “Dyslexie Font | Publishing Houses.” Dyslexiefont. Dyslexiefont, 2017. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Boer, Christian. Dyslexie-1. Digital image. Dyslexiefont.com. Dyslexiefont, 2017. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Corona, Felice, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, G.Rita Mangione, and Stefano Di Tore. Human Machine Interaction, Embodied Cognition and Phenomenology:the Body in Digital Storytelling. Learning & Teaching with Media & Technology. ATEE-SIREM Winter Conference Proceedings, 7 Mar. 2013. De Leeuw, Renske. “Special Font For Dyslexia?” Thesis. University of Twente, 2010. Special Font For Dyslexia? University of Twente, 2010. Web. “Definition of Dyslexia.” International Dyslexia Association. International Dyslexia Association, 2002. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Dyslexia Graphic. Digital image. Cure Adult Dyslexia. Cure Adult Dyslexia, 16 Jan. 2008. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Eye-Tracking Research on the Dyslexie Font. Eye-Tracking Research on the Dyslexie Font. University of Lille, 2010. Web. Frensch, Natasha. “Read Regular.” International Law Reports : 446-47. Read Regular. Read Regular, 2003. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. 14
Glass, Chris. “I Have Dyscalculia, Dyslexia’s Numerical Sibling.” The Tab Aberdeen. The Tab, 01 Apr. 2016. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Gonzalez, Abelardo. “OpenDyslexic.” OpenDyslexic. OpenDyslexic, 2008. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Grant, M. “Humans Not Robots.” Humans Not Robots - Support and Resources for SEN / SpLD. N.p., 01 Jan. 1970. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Hayhoe, Simon. The Need for Inclusive Accessible Technologies for Students with Disabilities and Learning Difficulties. Melton, UK: John Catt Educational, 2014. 257-74. Print. Haynes, Maya. “Why Books Need to Be Made More Accessible for Visually Impaired People.” Teen Opinion. Guardian News and Media, 04 Nov. 2015. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Jacko, Julie A., and Andrew Sears. Human-computer Interaction: Designing for Diverse Users and Domains. Boca Raton: CRC, 2009. Print. Newman, Renee M. “THE DYSCALCULIA SYNDROME.” Thesis. Dearborn, Michigan, 1998. The Dyscalculia Syndrome. Dyscalculia.org, 1998. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. Pijpker, Tineke. “Reading Performance of Dyslexics with a Special Font and a Colored Background.” Thesis. University of Twente, 2010. Reading Performance of Dyslexics with a Special Font and a Colored Background. University of Twente, 2010. Web. Rello, Luz. Table containing reading time and fixation. 2013. Raw data. Spain, Barcelona. Rello, Luz, and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. Good Fonts for Dyslexia. Dyslexia Help. University of Michigan, 2013. Web. 15
“The Biggest Large Print Myths.” The Gale Blog. The Gale Blog, 20 Apr. 2016. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. “The 7 Principles.” Centre for Excellence in Universal Design. National Disability Association, 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Tunnel Vision. Digital image. Rebuild Vision Eye Excersizes. Rebuild Vision, n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. “Typefaces for Dyslexia.” Dyslexic.com. Dyslexic.com, 26 May 2016. Web. 27 Feb. 2017.
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