RE: While I was teaching...

Thanks Wayne for sharing this with us :-)

Emmanuelle

-----Mensaje original-----
De: w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org] En nombre
de Wayne Dick
Enviado el: viernes, 03 de junio de 2011 23:45
Para: EOWG (E-mail)
Asunto: While I was teaching...

Hi Everyone,

I recently had a remarkable experience. I was teaching a session on
typographic accommodations that support visual readers with low vision. I
had explained how there are about 20 different common ways to get low vision
and these can attack about 15 systems in the eye and brain. This means that
low vision does not manifest in a uniform way.
That is why individual choice of typographic setting is so important.

I had gotten to the point where I showed style sheets that had worked for
real people in my experience. I told the anecdote about my friend who looked
at my favorite style and said, "If I had to look at that all day, I'd puke".
When I put up a style a woman in the middle row got very uncomfortable. She
said, "Could you turn that off? It makes me ill to look at it, or I'll have
to leave the room". I quickly changed the style sheet, and she went on to
say that she finally understood what was wrong in her life. People kept
shoving solutions to her visual problem at her, and they told her she was
crazy for claiming that they didn't work. She said, "When people call you
crazy long enough, you begin to believe it".

I spent the rest of the day building a custom solution for her. She felt
like a big burden had been lifted off her shoulders. She had started to
doubt her own sanity because all of the experts around her had told her what
should work for her, and wouldn't listen to what she needed.  She made my
point so passionately, that other people in the class teased me about hiring
her to attend.

One cookie cutter solution for people with low vision will not work across
the entire population. There just too many ways individuals in this group
see things, adapt to their disability and learn in general.
 Individuals must be able to choose their typographic style right down to
the letter, if they are to succeed.  I know this applies for many visual
readers with low vision, and I suspect it applies to most.

Without this level of accessibility support most people in this group will
spend their lives wondering why nothing really works for them.
They will rarely finish books, and always feel less than, because they
failed to assimilate correctly.

Every teacher loves to see the light go on in a student's eyes. This time I
got to see all the lights in Dodger Stadium go on.

Wayne

Received on Friday, 3 June 2011 23:02:24 UTC