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Week 11: Activity 24.5

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I was working with a student who is blind on Friday and I asked if I could look at my resource using her copy of Supernova. She was happy to let me and I was thrilled to find that it was easily accessible. She asked to have a look at it too and gave me her comments which were very useful.

She uses both text-to-speech and magnification. She was very happy with the navigation of the site and the speech function and she liked the font I had chosen, Arial, as it was clear when magnified. She especially commented on my use of headings so that she could jump directly to the section in which she was interested. She also liked the clear alt text for images and the long description of the more complex image.

She did not like the blue text on the main pages and the text font on the left hand menu. I cannot see any way to control the menu font as it is built in to the Google Sites program but it was a deliberate choice to have a blue font as a high contrast such as black on white can be difficult to read for people with dyslexia although a high contrast can be more easily accessible for people with a visual impairment. The resource is designed for support workers at OU Summer Schools and so I made the decision that it is more likely that support workers would have dyslexia than a severe visual impairment.

It raises the point that universal design can be problematic when impairments require conflicting accommodations.

 

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