Resource
Practical and visual guidelines for creating teaching materials and interactive systems that are flexible, legible and multisensory.
Recommendation
It is recommended to make available to every student, including those with a visual impairment, every teaching material, system or resource with information design attributes such as sharpness, contrast, size, hierarchy and so on, in order to guarantee quality of use and experience with autonomy.
The recommendations were formulated in Brazilian Portuguese. This is a faithful working translation; the Portuguese version is the canonical one. Read the original in Portuguese
Responsibility
Every manager, teacher, content author and instructional designer.
- Manager
- Teacher
- Content author
- Instructional designer
Opportunity
Every manager, teacher, content author and instructional designer has the opportunity to build accessibility-related attributes into the teaching material, system or resource, applying graphic design guidelines such as: sans-serif typefaces; regular, bold and extra-bold weights; type sizes of sixteen to eighteen points; ample, proportional spacing; line spacing of at least twenty-five to thirty per cent of the point size; thirty-nine characters per written line; black on yellow, green or blue; red on yellow or white; white on blue or black; yellow on black; dark-coloured elements on light-coloured backgrounds; structuring and organising information into different levels of importance and relevance across headings, subheadings and body text.
Applicability
Do
Apply the low-vision guidelines: sans-serif faces between 16 and 24pt, line spacing of 25% to 30% of the type size, a maximum column width of 39 characters, and dark backgrounds with light text (yellow or white on black).
Don’t
Create dense slides with serif faces, justified text, cramped spacing and combinations of analogous or complementary colours (such as green and red) that vibrate and prevent reading.
Examples
A block of text optimised according to Arditi’s guidelines: yellow text on a black background (very high performance), a large sans-serif face (18pt), generous line spacing (1.3) and line length limited to about 39 characters so that the reader does not lose the start of the next line.
Red on green, a combination considered to have extremely low visibility, creating optical vibration and confusion for colour-blind readers. On top of that, the small serif type and justified alignment create a dense block impossible to scan.