How to Design Web Content for People with Learning Disabilities

This document is a first working draft only. It has been created to test ideas and promote discussion. If you have any comments or would like to participate in this effort email us or join the LD Web guidelines list.

What to do

Understand the experience

The best way to design for any group of users is to try and understand how they use the Web, and what their user experience is.

Tools to understand the user experience:

Read the user example - try to imagine the experience.
Look at some pages in a language that you do not read fluently. See how much easier it is when the sentences are shorter and when pages are well laid out.
Run a simulation on your page that makes your page hard for you to read, and forces you to spell out each word before recognizing it. Again, see how much harder it is to understand a page with long sentences, less white space, and a lot of content. See resources for links to simulators for learning disabilities.

Use plain language

Use simple and clear text so more people will be able to combine reading the text and understanding its meaning.

Example

Unclear text: High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.

Clear text:Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.

Unclear text:Restricting oneself to the use of monosyllabic presentations for the purpose of clarification of complex conceptualizations enables more understandability to become a part of the intercommunicational experience.

Clear text:

Short Strong Words
In Small Groups
Make Things Clear

Pointers for clear text use:

Using clear words (not ambiguous wording) will help people understand your text
Use simple words: Choose simpler words that are understood by as many people as possible. For example, try to use words that would be understood by young children. You can refer to word lists of age appropriate vocabularies (words that you expect a child of a certain age to understand) to help you choose simple wording. You can also use a thesaurus or book of synonyms to replace complex words with simple ones. Often a long complex word can be replaced by two simple words like set up, in place of establish.
Avoid terms that not everyone will understand, like jargon and phrases in a different language. When you need difficult words, jargon or words from a different language, provide translations or glossary information.
Use simple grammar rules - (like active voicing in English)

RDF is a new protocol that has very robust support for adding glossary and support information. See resources.

Tools and tests

There is no substitute for testing a document on real people. Ask people to read your site who are aging, from a different culture and learning disabled. Check that they are really confident that they understood everything. Can they use the site? Is it clear?

Flesch Reading Ease score: It measures the average sentence length in words and the average word length in syllables. You put these two numbers into an equation and get a number between 0 and 100 that indicates how clear and simple the writing is.

The formula:

Step 1 - Multiply the average sentence length by 1.015.

Step 2 - Multiply the average word length by 84.6.

Step 3 - Add the two numbers.

Step 4 - Subtract this sum from 206.835.

The balance is your readability score. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document.

The minimum score for Plain English is 60. Conversational English should score at least 80.

Microsoft Word can calculate the reading level of documents, based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. (To make Microsoft Word check readability automatically, you can select Tools, Options, Spelling, and Grammar.)

Use a clear and logical page layout

Use a clear and logical layout. This will help people follow what you are saying.

Example

Unclear text: You will require writing equipment such as pencils, preferably, in red, green and blue, pens, calculator, eraser, possibly a sharpener or other useful equipment.

Clear text: Please bring:

pencils
- red
- green
- blue
pens
calculator
eraser
sharpener (optional)
anything else you may need

Pointers for clear page layout:

Use short sentences and paragraphs; Try to keep separate ideas in separate sentences and paragraphs. Break up long, complex sentences and change them into a few short ones.
Use bulleted or numbered lists
Use an easy-to-scan page layout.

Tips and tests

Think what are the points that you want to say
Break up the points you want to say into logical steps
Use white space to separate ideas
Test your site on real people.

Use friendly defaults

Many users with non-specific learning disabilities will have trouble overriding your page settings. Start the page with a format that makes it easier to read and understand.

Pointers for defaults

Use a clear default font such as Arial.
Avoid italics which are harder to read.
Avoid all capitalized sentences. These are also harder to read.
Break up the text as much as possible into short paragraphs.
Separate the paragraphs with headings.
Use color to explain the document structure such as separate colors for heading 1 and heading level 2.
Highlight key concepts.
Use bulleted lists.
Use white space to separate paragraphs.
Use leading (line space) of 1.5 to 2 times the space.
Keep lines left justified.

Use pictures

The less your site depends on written words the more people with language impairments will understand your page.

Pointers for illustration

Illustrate instructions.
Illustrate important navigation elements (like contact us, and home).
Use well known symbols (like ? for help, < for back).
Illustrate important concepts.
Avoid distracting animations.

The most robust support for illustrating has been provided through new RDF languages. This enables you to provide pictorial alternatives for text and supports translation of your full Web page into symbols. You can annotate each concept in your site and and the disabled user will see a symbolic representation of annotated words. See resources

Keep the amount of required reading down

Pointers for reducing the reading

Use less content per page

Separate (using mark up) important and unimportant content

And keep the amount of important content down.

Tools:

This can be done by making less important content smaller, and make important content strong or emphasized.

RDF is a new protocol that has very robust support for this type of tagging. See resources.

Help people find the content they need

Information is only useful if you can find it. The more people have to read and overview before they find the information that they need, the less likely it is that they will find it at all.

Tools to help people find content

A clear site map.
Clear and distinct page titles.
Topic maps for complex content.
Summaries of pages and sections of content.

Clarifying document structure and role within your page encoding, allows a special browser to simplify the content and draw a topic map for you.

Use your code and heading levels to build logical and clear structure into your page. The browser can then give the user a clear outline of the page.

Using clear and unique header titles will also help automatic page summaries

RDF is a new protocol that has very robust support for this type of tagging. See resources

Make your site safe

Web content designed for people with disabilities should be safe content. Non-exploitive, honest and fair.

Note that some people with disabilities may be unsure about when they have left your site, so ensure that sites you link to are also safe for your users.

If you need to link to a less safe site make sure that the user knows that they are leaving your site and that you are not guaranteeing the reliability of the content of the linked-to site.

Support user preferences

Allow the user to control the look and feel of the site as much as possible

Pointers for supporting user preferences

Make text expandable
Make pictures expandable
Allow for a user-familiar style sheet and look
Use your code and heading levels to build logical and clear structure into your page
In HTML pages: Put all format and style information into a CSS style sheet.
In HTML pages and in CSS: Avoid using fixed font sizes (Px) that can not be expanded. Use em to set font sizes

Use robust solutions

Learning and cognitive disabilities are many and varied.

Fortunately, there are many different special browsers and tools so that people can pick the one that helps them the most. However, tools for learning disabilities are often made by small companies, and cater to a small niche of users, making them less robust. Not all special browsers can run JavaScript and complicated protocols. You cannot assume that you know what browsers your users are using or what system they are using. Building your Website using open and well known standards makes it more likely that your site will work well for all your users.

Ensure software is able to read your site

Allow content to be read by a reading program screen reader/browser . Pictures cannot be read, but put any information from the picture into an alt tag (or text equivalent) that can be read by a screen reader.

Dyslexics are typically not using high end, expensive and difficult to learn screen readers that the visually impaired prefer. Testing your site in Jaws will not simulate the learning disabled experience.

There are a number of points to bear in mind when preparing information for use with text readers.

Use full stops, semi-colons, commas after headings and bullet points to make the voice pause.
Number menu items to aid navigation.
Avoid writing full words in capital letters since screen readers may spell them out.
Many screen readers may have difficulty with tables. They can mix up the page order.

Design with all disability groups in mind

People with learning difficulties frequently have more than one impairment. Design your site so that people with all disabilities can use it. (For general guidelines on making the Web accessible see www.w3.org/wai)

Key points for general accessibility

Allow for different input devices, especially keyboard access (not everyone uses a mouse).
Provide transcripts of audio files for deaf users.
Avoid flicker that can cause seizures.

Resources

http://www.ubaccess.com/artsimulator.html: Simulator for learning disabilities
http://www.ubaccess.com/rdf.html : RDF schema for accessibility
http://80.60.189.118/wwaac/ The WAAC: symbolic language representation for web content
http://www.dyslexia-parent.com/mag35.html: Dyslexia Online Magazine

Thanks to: John Bradford

References

AHRC New York at http://www.ahrcnyc.org/ DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994),

AHRC New York City http://www.ahrcnyc.org/index.htm FAQ's Sheet (2002)

American Association on Mental Retardation. (1992).

Mental Retardation: Definition, Classification, and Systems of Supports, 9th Edition. Washington, DC. Alexander, D. (1998).

Prevention of Mental Retardation: Four Decades of Research.

Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews. 4: 50-58 Batshaw, M. (1997).

The Arc. (1982). The Prevalence of Mental Retardation.

US Administration on Developmental Disabilities, see http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/add/Factsheet.htm, -January 25, 2002 http://www.mang.canterbury.ac.nz/courseinfo/AcademicWriting/Flesch.htm