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Re: Vertical text

for

From: James A.
Date: Jan 20, 2020 3:04PM

Steve,

I agree this would be a significant barriers for many people and it's also unlikely to work with many text to speech tool. Would it fail Meaningful Sequence? Personally, I would be looking very carefully at 1.4.10 Reflow and whether " without requiring scrolling in two dimensions" was met as well as 1.4.12 Text spacing. If the client is based in Europe and Australia, I would also be stressing the functional requirements of the EN 301 549 standards which underpin the laws (although this is not normative language within the standards).

So far this use case has not been discussed for any 2.2 new success criteria. The closest discussion I am aware of is within the COGA group where we have discussed requirements for ensuring text to speech read aloud content correctly and that text is presented clearly. But these requirements are heading for supporting documentations as they are difficult to make into testable success criteria.

There is plenty of research and guidance that makes reference to direction and align format of text affecting reading for people with dyslexia and cognitive difficulties. The British Dyslexia Association Style Guide (http://bit.ly/BDA-style) has always recommended left aligned text and avoid columns.

Best wishes

Abi


Dr Abi James
Principle Accessibility Consultant, AbilityNet
Visiting Research Fellow, University of Southampton
BDA New Technologies Committee