AccessAbility Hints for People with Visual Impairment

Rev. Dr. Devorah Greenstein
Accessibilities Program Associate, UUA
Boston, MA

Almost eight million Americans have difficulty reading or are unable to read letters in regular print, even while wearing eyeglasses. Twenty-five percent of elderly people report that they have difficulty reading regular printed material. From these statistics, we calculate that thousands of Unitarian Universalists find it difficult or impossible to read regular printed material – like this information sheet! Reading regular print in our older churches, built in the early days of electric lighting and dimly lit by modern standards, can be even more of a challenge.

Fortunately, with most of our printed material produced on computers, it can be simple to create not only a large- print version of the weekly order of service, which is likely to come to mind first, but also large print newsletters, agendas and minutes, so that people with difficulty reading regular print can more fully participate in congregational activities

Tips for creating large-print materials:

• Use a sans serif font such as Arial – the best font size is 18-point (minimum 16-point).
• Use single line spacing; double line spacing does not help.
• Use bold instead of italics -- italic fonts are harder to read.
• Increase the size of headings by 2 or more points and highlight using bold.
• Use block style paragraphs without indentation – insert an extra line between paragraphs.
• Left-justify the text. Do not right-justify. Try to avoid hyphenation.
• Print on one side of the paper to prevent the reverse side printing from showing through.
• Use black print on dull finish white, ivory, cream or yellow paper.

Please do not make assumptions about what will be helpful—instead, ask the individual. Maybe even 18-point printing isn’t a viable option, or maybe 14-point font would work. Maybe the person would enjoy audio taped cassettes of the newsletter or other lengthy documents. Or maybe they would most enjoy having a volunteer visit and read the newsletter in person.

The American Printing House for the Blind has an online resource Large Print: Guidelines for Optimal Readability http://www.aph.org/edresearch/lpguide.htm that goes into great detail about producing large print documents.

For excellent general accessibility information, download Accessible Faith: A Technical Guide for Accessibility in Houses of Worship a 52-page PDF file. http://www.rrf.org/noteworthy/accessible.html