Readability & Accessibility by design

The reading experience depends a lot of the context & environment Inclusive Design & Accessibility meetup • March 2019 • @iamhiwelo It’s shaped by our surroundings (am I in a loud coffee shop or otherwise distracted?), our availability (am I busy with something else?), our needs (am I skimming for something specific?), and more. Reading is not only informed by what’s going on with us at that moment, but also governed by how our eyes and brains work to process information. As our eyes move across the text, our minds gobble up the type’s texture—the sum of the positive and negative spaces inside and around letters and words. We don’t linger on those spaces and details; instead, our brains do the heavy lifting of parsing the text and assembling a mental picture of what we’re reading. Our eyes see the type and our brains see Don Quixote chasing a windmill.