Dyslexia-friendly font: Offering more accessibility options to our users

[eschiebel]

Hi, I'm Ed Schiebel, guest blog poster and Senior Software Engineer with Instructure, where I spend my days working on Canvas. Here at Instructure we periodically have a Hackweek, where engineers get to work on features we don't have time to tinker with during the normal course of business. Sometimes hackweek ideas come from being up to our necks in the guts of Canvas, sometimes ideas come from our product, support, or customer success colleagues, and sometimes ideas come from reading posts in the Instructure Community from you folks. This post is about one of the latter.

What’s Changing: 

Instructure and Canvas have a long history of accessibility in support of our diverse user community, and I have personally been involved with software accessibility for well over a decade. With that in mind I went searching for a hackweek project in the community and came across this post asking for Canvas to support a font that's easier to read for our users with dyslexia. It took a while (a couple hackweeks with months in between), but in the latest Canvas release users may now choose to use a dyslexia friendly font as their default font throughout Canvas. 

Why? 

We’re committed to accessibility and making a dyslexia-friendly font available is another way we’re making Canvas more accessible for all. This new user-level feature flag replaces the default font in Canvas with Open Dyslexic, an open source font created to help increase readability for readers with dyslexia. Our instructors and students can now use this feature to help make their teaching and learning easier. While we know that the research behind this font is not necessarily conclusive, we want to offer users the opportunity to decide for themselves which settings are best for their own learning, needs, and success by offering them options.

What to Expect: 

Similar to the option that has Canvas render in a high contrast, a Use a Dyslexia Friendly Font toggle now appears in the user's Profile Tray,

and as a selection in the Feature Options section of the user's Settings page.

When turned on in either location Canvas replaces its default font with OpenDyslexic, an open source font designed for improved readability for those with common dyslexia symptoms.

Thanks to those of you who are active in the Instructure Community. Your voices really do help make Canvas better.

[MelissaPiette]

I love this @eschiebel .  I'm also wondering about the possibility of having this feature within the Canvas Student App on iOS.  Thanks! 

[LakenyaWoolridg]

Thanks

[jdurancal]

Hi @eschiebel ,

This is a great functionality,  we believe it will be very helpful for our students.

We've noticed that in some parts of the course, the feature doesn't seem to work as expected. Could this be related to our custom CSS, possibly affecting the visibility of certain titles or texts?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[christopher_phi]

Thanks for sharing this feature @eschiebel, this is helpful step to giving users flexibility in how they experience Canvas. It is great to see Instructure prioritize accessibility and user customization. Allowing users to choose their font is a helpful option, I'm sure there are many users who appreciate having the ability to use the OpenDyslexic font. I'm sure you have reviewed some of the mixed results of the impact of OpenDyslexic for users with dyslexia - in the future you may consider approaches that allow users to select a font that works best for them. In the meantime, it may be helpful to note that there are tools and browser extensions that allow users to set their preferred fonts that work on across sites. It is probably a known issue and technical limitation, but it appears the feature doesn't work for content within iframes which would include LTI tools and New Quizzes.

[eschiebel]

@jdurancal, can you be more specific about what parts of a course isn't working as expected? If your custom CSS alters the font-family, that could cause issues. The OpenDyslexlic font is larger than Canvas' default Lato, so you will see some text wrap that didn't before. If there are issues I want to address them.

@christopher_phi LTI tools are not in our control, what's in their iframe is controlled by the tool authors. I'll explore if there are ways around this, but I'm not hopeful. Since New Quizzes is an Instructure feature and part of Canvas, I will work to incorporate them. My bad on that oversight.

Allowing users to select their own font is a good idea, but would be significantly more complicated. We're going to have to live with OpenDyslexic for now.

@MelissaPiette The iOS and Android apps are developed separately from web-based Canvas. I will talk with the mobile product managers and see what we can do. For now, this feature is limited to the web version.

[stimme]

@eschiebel Instructure has several first-party LTIs besides New Quizzes. Please also consider coordinating the dyslexia-friendly font feature with NQ Item Banks, Canvas Studio, New Analytics, Roll Call Attendance, Smart Search, Chat, etc.

[MelissaPiette]

@eschiebel Thank you!  With more and more students using mobile devices to access learning through their workflow (K-Higher Ed), ensuring the iOS and Android platforms function with the similar features is so important for consistency, equity and access.  I appreciate you following up with the mobile product managers on this.  Do the mobile product managers also share updates in the community?  

[eschiebel]

@MelissaPiette yes, mobile product managers are here. @JuditTarnoy is lead PM for native mobile.

[HugoContreras]

Thank you! could we also get a dark theme? with a dark background and light colored text?

[dbrace]

@HugoContreras, a dark theme is a very common request and it is my understanding that they are working on it. Something to keep in mind though is that releasing a dark theme can be quite complicated because of individual institution themes and designs created by each instructor/teacher.

-Doug