Monthly Archives: September 2012

Accessibility and Dyslexia

Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, posted an update to his beloved iOS app today. In the notes he listed a new feature that instantly grabbed my attention and gave me one of the first, “Ah ha,” moments I have had in a very long time. The feature was listed as follows:

New Open-Dyslexic font to increase legibility for readers with dyslexia.

Upon reading that line I realized something, in my six years of creating websites I have tried to think of every accessibility issue I could imagine and account for it. Most issues, such as having large enough fonts for people hard-of-sight and mixing tones in addition to color in order to account for colorblind-ness, come second nature to me now. But, I have never once thought (I am ashamed to admit) that dyslexia was something I could help with. I always thought dyslexia was something that fell into the abyss of, “I can’t do anything about it.” Happily, thanks to Mr. Arment, I now know I can do something about it.

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