Written by Octavia Nyombi
For an audio version of this blog, please click this Soundcloud link:
After receiving everyone’s completed sign-up forms, I collated everyone's needs and access information into a spreadsheet to send on to our access consultant, Joe Strickland from Chronic Insanity. Joe wrote up a big list of suggestions as to how to make our R&D as accessible as possible.
The Snack Table!
One of these suggestions included, downloading a free dyslexic friendly font called, OpenDyslexic, and reformatting our scripts, materials and forms into this font moving forward.
We were particularly excited by this clear, eye catching font. So much so that I downloaded OpenDyslexic to my macbook myself, and had a play with the software to get to grips with it. Through this exploration I realised however that OpenDyslexic is not compatible with Gmail or Google Docs, which we use to share and collaborate on documents together. Therefore I did some more research and settled on a font called ‘Lexend’ - which is the recommended dyslexic friendly font in the google help pages.
Alongside this, we didn’t print any of our scripts on white paper, rather we had scripts printed in both light yellow and light purple for people to choose from. The script was single-sided, in 1.5 spacing and font size 12.
By making the script easier to read for everyone, this did not ‘other’ anybody for having specific access needs.
Additionally for those who had not given us any specific instructions for their scripts, we found that having the different colours and an aesthetically pleasing script was a good mood lift, getting away from the expectations of traditional white paper with dense black ink. For example, the simple act of making a choice as to what colour script you would like, is already building a sense of ownership over your experience in this process.
Part 3 coming soon… reflecting on freeing ourselves from expectations!