[accessibleimage] designers and accessibility


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

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