Maybe it’s the teacher in me but I really feel like we as a society should be more aware of UDL. It’s primarily a teaching tool but honestly it would benefit everyone.
If you don’t know what UDL is it stands for universal design for learning.
Which is just a really fancy way of saying making various mediums (like presentations, infographics, commercials) accessible to everyone by using the appropriate modality, size, color, and pacing.
This was created as a means of helping people understand content like people with learning disabilities, color blindness, and dyslexia! But eventually we realized that this was assisting all learners by making it accessible to everyone, not just someone with a disability!
Basically, if your text is really tiny with a squiggly font it might not be readable to your learner. You might say “why should I care about this? I’m not a teacher nor do I ever expect to teach someone.”
Well presumably if you’re creating something through whatever medium, you want your audience to be able to engage with it to the fullest extent! Regardless of whatever you’re creating, all creators have a message or content that they’re sharing or trying to communicate to their audience. Sometimes that message might get lost because it’s simply hard to understand due to the aforementioned modality, color, pacing, or size. Even if the message is just as simple as “Imagine if this character went and had some ice cream.”
It also might feel like this is a really hard task and that it would take extra time to create when really it’s about just taking a couple of extra steps to double check things.
Modality-can your learner (or audience) engage with this in multiple ways such as visual, aural, or touch. An example of this would be adding closed captions to a video.
Color- can your audience engage with this without color? Meaning, if your sole message is relayed through the coloring of your work—not everyone is going to understand it. It can also just mean making sure that your colors aren’t contrasting against each other making it hard to see or understand what’s in the picture. A good example of this would be to make sure that your color isn’t influencing the ability to read your text. If your text is white on a mostly cool toned background, it’s going to be hard to read for some people which might make people miss the message.
Size- can your audience see your work? If something is too small some people are going to struggle to see it. Alternatively, if something is too large and takes too much focus, they might miss something that’s going on in the background that you wanted to convey.
Pacing- does the pacing of your work make sense? Basically, if you put 20 million teeny tiny things into 3 seconds of a clip the likelihood is that it’s going to go missed. Allow time for your audience to process and be able to pick up on what you’re trying to convey.
Fun fact! Comic sans is considered one of the more accessible fonts to read for people with reading disabilities because of the lack of repeating shapes in the characters! Arial, century gothic, calibri, and other sans fonts are also considered good choices!
