Fwd: Comments on WCAG 2.1 draft on behalf of British Dyslexia Association

Forwarding this on..

All the best

Lisa

Dear Lisa
 
I am writing to you as Chair of the British Dyslexia Association’s New Technologies Committee regarding the draft recommendation for WCAG 2.1. We actively support the addition of guidelines that allow the layout and personalisation of content for those who have print disabilities such as dyslexia. Many of the new guidelines such as adapting text layout and font style, presenting text in manageable blocks and use of plain language support meet the recommendations of the British Dyslexia Association Style Guide (https://goo.gl/Ap2eH1 ) which is widely cited by researchers and designers and based on many decades of experience of working with children and adults with dyslexia. 
 
We also hope that these recommendations will consider the needs of users using basic and free assistive tools (such as clipboard readers) that do not always use the accessibility APIs or see hidden text. It is particularly important to the community we support that any text or symbols (such as maths or science notation) are in a form that can be adapted to the user’s preferred font and layout as well as being accessible to text to speech tools. From what I can see in the current recommendations, text will be allowed to be presented as an image as long as there is alt-tags at level A or AA conformance. This is because guideline 1.4.8 only  applies to Level AAA. In addition, I cannot find any guidelines that encourage the use of MathML (or other maths and scientific markup) instead of images which would allow users to personalise as well as hear the content of these representations. 
 
I hope this message will be of use and please contact me by email if you would like to discuss this further. 
 
I will attempt to raise specific queries with individual guidelines on Github although this is not an appropriate interface for non-developers to understand and is particularly difficult for people like myself with print disabilities due to the amount of information that has to be read to understand the status of an issue. If possible in future it would be much easier to present these issues in an accessible survey, like the gov.uk site uses for consultations.
 
Best wishes
 
Abi 
 

Dr Abi James 
Research Fellow Accessibility Team, WAIS, ECS University of Southampton 
Consultant, Assistive Learning Ltd
BDA New Technologies committee
Email: a.james@soton.ac.uk / abi@assisitvelearning.co.uk 
Mobile: (+44) 07941 465985