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.