Around campus, spam is posted for students to learn about various events that need to be made easily accessible. Additionally, for science posters, presentations, and other academic resources, accessibility is crucial. Here are some things to keep in mind and some useful tools to use when you make your next project.
Color
If you've taken a statistics class, you may have heard of the black and white test. Some colors appear darker than others even if they only thing different is the hue. Primarily for printing, turning an image into greyscale can help identify any hard to see images. For images in Google Docs, you can right click an image, go to image options, and recolor it. When it comes to selecting background and text colors, you can alternatively use a contrast checker, such as this one: WebAIM contrast checker.
Fonts and Font Size
WebAIM is a website that aims for web accessibility, but a lot of the topics can be applicable to making posters and other informational graphics. For example, they have a page about fonts (accessible through the following link: WebAIM font information). In general, you should test for a font that has distinguishable letters (1, capital I, and capital L are an easy test, often a capital I and lowercase L are simply different heights) but is still tonally appropriate.
Regarding font size, text can be somewhat smaller when digital, with a recommended minimum size of 12 pt, but should not be smaller than 9 pt. However, if it is an image with text, we recommend 16 pt or larger. If in print, text should be no smaller than 12 pt, with a recommended 14 pt or larger. For posters, keep in mind that these guidelines align more with essay-style printing, so larger text is ideal.
For large posters (greater than printing paper), you can look up pt or px to inch conversions. However, you can find general guidelines for different applications (science posters have a recommended 85pt title, for example) instead. You can do print tests to see if you can read the main title on your poster from 4 feet away. Some software has canvas or document size limits, so you can scale them. For example, if you want a 48" by 24" poster, you may need to instead do 24" x 12" poster, so you would need to also scale your text size.
Formatting
Bold, italic, and oblique formatting should be used sparingly. Italic and oblique text can be harder to read than bold, so when possible use bold to emphasize text. When highlighting text, make sure to double check the color contrast. Text only in uppercase letters should be avoided as much as possible. Text only in lowercase letters makes sentences less distinct and should also be avoided unless necessary. Underlined text should not have the line connecting to the letters being underlined. When digital, make sure to indicate where a hyperlink is, and inserting the link without "attaching" it to text (text-to-speech readers can have difficulties with long URLs).
Digital Only
Google docs, slides, etc. have alt-text options when you right-click an image, which is especially important when you have text within the image. You can add in purely informative captions or do descriptive ones. Twitter also has the option when you click or tap on the photo, and Instagram has added in the capability to add alt-text under the "Advanced settings" for the post. You can also contact us if you need help making alt-text!
This is not an exhaustive list of everything to keep in mind, but this is a general overview. Feel free to reach out if you want to get input from an SAA or your org is interested in coordinating a workshop for your e-board/spam creator(s).
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