Improving experience

Document layout and fonts

One area I really struggle with at UoR is the formatting of documents. I find the Effra font hard work, but also, the lack of space around paragraphs and headings in documents. It would really help if the templates could move towards having more space under paragraphs eg 12 points, to enable the user to hunt for the key bit of information they want.

What we are doing about it

We have received some feedback from colleagues that the Effra font is not easy to read. We will discuss this with our creative design teams to see what changes we can do to make it more accessible to everyone. As a short term solution, we suggest using Pixie: Accessibility Reader extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox (Lexia Reader) browsers. This browser extension allows the user to view a webpage with selected font and other personalisation. Find more about Pixie browser extension for accessibility.

We are also looking at document templates to make sure they are accessible. We have also organised training for our colleages in the governance area to help them create more accessible documents.

Use of colour

“I have moderate deuteranopia which is a common type of colour blindness that makes reds, greens, and yellows blur together. I get tripped up all the time by the 'red-amber-green' traffic light colour coding in graphs, tables, spreadsheets, and reports. It’s habit for me to switch between different colour filters on Windows until I can read a document properly. Colour blindness is a spectrum so there is no 'correct colour palette' that works for everyone but using shapes and symbols is a great way to make work accessible for everyone”.

What we are doing about it

We are raising accessibility awareness around the use of colour and advising our colleagues not to use colour as the only means of differentiating information. We are changing the University status boards to make them more accessible. This is our Digital technology status page. Here colour and symbols are used to inform the status of a service so that it is more accessible.

View our guide on Accessible use of colour.