[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] designers and accessibility

[Lisa Yayla]

Very nice article
 excerpt
http://www.designweek.co.uk/Articles/138289/Forcing+accessible+font+sizes.html

Forcing accessible font sizes
Last month, a bill that could impact massively on graphic design was 
given its second reading in Parliament. Broxtowe MP Nick Palmer's Small 
Print Bill aims to make it a legal obligation for certain types of print 
- particularly advertising, marketing material and contracts - to use 
type at a minimum of 12pt. Unsurprisingly, the bill is receiving 
widespread support from a number of organisations, among them the RNIB, 
Age Concern, Help the Aged, the Plain English Campaign and the Trading 
Standards Institute.

The graphic design community and design bodies have remained noticeably 
quiet on the issue, but given the expected doubling of numbers of sight 
impaired from two million to four million in the next three decades, 
it's one that designers and printers should be addressing and even 
taking a lead on. So are they?

RNIB publishing manager Katherin Ekstrom, who oversees all the charity's 
print material, has found that designers do consult it for advice and 
access its See It Right guide, which was published, she explains, 'in 
response to a demand for information about how to design information to 
make it accessible to people with sight problems'. But, she points out, 
they only do so when they're 'working for a client requiring accessible 
print'. And their starting point is often a decidedly negative 'How do I 
make my document meet required guidelines?', rather than 'How do I find 
the best way of communicating with the user?' Designers are so far 
outside the loop that they weren't even consulted when the guide was 
updated and republished last year. Printers, too, rarely feature in any 
considerations about accessible print. 'We haven't really discussed 
issues with printers, more with paper companies like McNaughtons and 
Robert Horne,' says Ekstrom. Part of the problem may lie in the fact 
that designers' interest in accessible print has not advanced much 
beyond the basics, such as type (size, font, leading and colours) and 
stock (weights, colour, bright

ness and texture), and most designers still believe that accessible 
print means restrictions and compromise in design vision and brand 
communication. But, as the RNIB publication Voice and this week's 
large-print version of The Guardian's Society supplement show, this 
needn't be the case. And one designer has categorically proved it. Sean 
Donahue, the founder of Los Angeles-based design practice Research 
Centered Design, has worked in the low-vision community for seven years, 
creating Touch, a hybrid print and tactile publication aimed at low- and 
no-vision reading audiences. 'Its editorial voice is intended to reflect 
the rich contemporary culture of publishing by including access to both 
text and pictographic tactile communication,' says Donahue.

Touch, as Donahue explains, 'intermixes tactile expression and Braille 
type form to create relationships between Braille text and tactile 
imagery'. It uses scale to create hierarchy (rare in conventional 
Braille) and Braille patterns to complement and express the editorial 
voice of the text through form. In parts it replaces text altogether 
with texture or pattern, to help readers to understand something like a 
city, for example. 'Readers absolutely enjoyed it. They relished the 
idea that it offered not an index but gaps that they had to fill with 
their imagination and experience. It was the difference between 
guidelines and communication that they noticed,' Donahue adds. He had to 
co-ordinate much of the printing himself, and as conventions of both 
Braille and ink printing were broken, he had to be heavy-handed on how 
things were treated. 'It was all printed by local printers, and not very 
knowledgeable ones at that,' he notes.




http://www.designweek.co.uk/Articles/138289/Forcing+accessible+font+sizes.html