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This tutorial serves two purposes. The first is for assessors or people who are assessing their own visual needs and goes through the steps I take with some of my clients to determine optimal font configuration. The second purpose is for users who are unaware of the font accessibility options available in the current incarnation of Microsoft Word, and how these can be enabled and tinkered with. These users might want to skip straight to the second page.
Please read the following information before moving on to read the actual assessment strategy. I believe that It's important to have a decent background knowledge of the options available in Word and the pitfalls you may stumble across. You would probably also benefit from having a grasp on the basics of how Windows displays itself using pixels and GUI components - I have a very simple page dealing with How Screens Work followed by another similar page covering How Windows Displays itself.
Most people use Microsoft Word to type their documents and letters, and some use Word to write emails. With this amount of use it’s important to be sure that Word is as visually accessible as possible. Surely the first place to start is to make sure you are using the optimum font in your documents? Although it seems obvious many, many people continue to use the tiny, cramped Times New Roman font:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Although Time New Roman may be suitable for some, I have met only a very few people with visual impairment or specific learning difficulty (such as dyslexia) who prefer it to other freely available fonts. The vast majority find sans-serif fonts such as Arial more comfortable to read. Apart from changing the font style, one can also experiment with font size, character spacing, line spacing and colour combinations.
This tutorial takes you through the process I go through in the early steps of many of my vision and dyslexia assessments. This process determines the best font style for any user while also teaching them what Word can accomplish in visual accessibility.
The font that Microsoft Word starts typing in when you begin a document (and that it frequently returns to half way through) is determined by the Normal Style. If you know little about styles then please read my short article on using Word's styles.
Now there is a bit of a problem with font sizes which I’ll try to briefly explain. People often come to me with a recommended comfortable ‘print size’ in the form of N18, N36 or similar. This number is for printed text and the number represents the height of the letters based on 72 points (N72) being one inch high.
One could easily assume, then, that a N36 user on paper would be an N36 user on the computer. If only things were that simple!
The size a letter of any given font size appears on the screen is dependent on:
N14 on a 19” screen will be about 12% larger than N14 on a 17” screen running at the same resolution. A 15” screen will display all fonts 21% smaller than the same font size on the 19” screen, again assuming they both use the same resolution. That means that a size 14pt font on the 19” screen will appear to be equivilent to size 11pt on the 15” screen. It's important to either assess using the screen size you will recommend, or factor these differences into your conclusions.
On my 15.4” laptop screen a resolution of 1280 x 800 gives me text of 'actual size' equivalent to a printed copy (when Word is zoomed to 100%). At a lower resolution of 800 x 500 each pixel grows to fill the same space, thus everything is significantly bigger, and therefore Word requires only a zoom value of 64% to accurately emulate actual size.
Unsure about resolutions? Quickly read How Screens Work.
Many programs, including Word, support magnification of the page using a zoom tool. While this does not affect the printed font size obviously fonts will appear twice as large when zoomed to 200% than when at 100%. More information about the pros and cons of Word's Zoom feature is below.
Yep. Not all fonts follow the strict PostScript rule of "72 points high = 1 inch high" and some fonts (e.g. Times New Roman) actually appear noticeably smaller than other fonts (e.g. Arial).
Different monitors can be calibrated to display colours in different ways so be careful when you are recommending colour combinations! I noticed that this is especially apparent on TFT/LCD 'flat' screens compared to the older <a href="/tutorials/access/winxp/disp_bg_screens.htm">CRT</a> 'tube' screens. I once recommended a black text on yellow background for a pupil. Although this looked fine and was very comfortable on the assessment laptop (which uses a TFT) it was bright and full of glare on the classroom computer which used a <a href="/tutorials/access/winxp/disp_bg_screens.htm">CRT</a> screen.
Why use a large font size when Word has a tool for zooming in and out? The font size that you opt for will affect print outs as well as what you see on screen. The zoom function does not affect print-outs.
When using a higher zoom magnification only a very limited amount of the document can appear on the screen at any one time in either view mode, but this is more of a problem in Print Layout than Normal view.
The Normal view is more suited to the use of the zoom tool as the lines of text can be set to automatically wrap to the next line. The problem with Normal view is it doesn’t give an indication of what your document will look like when it is printed.
The Print Layout view gives the user a ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) interface. This allows one to see the image of the page and how elements and text will appear when printed, even while one is writing the document. I personally prefer to use the Print Layout view. When zooming in using this view words do not automatically wrap to the next line. Consequently the zoom function requires extensive ‘panning’ to the left and right as well as up and down. This can slow down the production of written material and lead to confusion and mistakes.
Although I would often recommend Normal mode for people with fairly severe visual difficulties, I think most people I have assessed prefer the Print Layout mode.
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