I encountered this post on Instagram the other day:
The embedded text is an example of Bionic Reading, which formats the text to increase your reading speed and focus. Specifically, it bolds the beginning of each word so that your visual saccades have anchor points as your eyes go along each line. Within the actual Bionic Reading product, there are many more precise settings as well.
Did you give it a try? If you’re like me, you could read that paragraph much faster than usual. Now, I don’t know how it would hold up over a long reading session—like sprinting, it’s easy to read fast and focus for a short time when you have to.
This caught my attention because the post is geared toward people with ADHD, which I don’t have. But like me, one commentator on the post wrote, “Isn’t this just easier for everyone to read?” Indeed.
The Curb Cut Effect
We take it for granted that at every intersection and crosswalk there are gentle slopes up to the sidewalk. These slopes are called “curb cuts,” a term many people haven’t heard because the feature is so ubiquitous it hardly needs a name.
But we didn’t always have curb cuts; they had to be invented. The story is fascinating; it involves activists taking sledgehammers to Berkeley sidewalks in the night.
Curb cuts were invented to make life easier for people in wheelchairs, yet once they were invented people realized they were useful for everyone. Strollers, dollies, luggage, texting while walking.
This phenomenon has become known as the curb cut effect. We see it everywhere. Subtitles are another great example. If they were originally added for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, today subtitle use is extremely prevalent in online videos. One study found that 70% of Gen Z viewers regularly use subtitles.
The lesson is that if you implement an accommodation for people with a particular disability, often that accommodation makes things better of everyone.
Another example: When I teach, every day I have students respond to discussion questions. Often these conversations extend for 15 or 20 minutes. Previously, I just posed these questions orally. But at some point, I began showing the question on the projection screen as well. This was primarily for the benefit of the English learners in the group, but I found that all students benefited from being able to refer back to the question throughout the conversation.
Guidelines for Accessibility
Enabling the curb cut effect in your own work may not seem so easy. Where do you begin? How do you know what kind of change will be helpful?
Like anything else, I think it’s best to proceed through observation and iteration. Start with something and then learn over time how you can improve it.
But beyond that, fortunately there are some guidelines out there. Perhaps the best established are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—WCAG, often pronounced wacag. WCAG has thorough documentation, but all the guidelines boil down to four principles that form the acronym POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Perceivable: Content and interface elements should be presented in a way that users can perceive. This means considering people with different sensory abilities and limitations. For instance, color should never be the only means of distinguishing one element from another, since not everyone can see color or see at all (also make use of size, boldness, etc., and ensure that the content is navigable with a screen reader).
Operable: Interfaces should not require interactions that a user cannot perform. Following this guideline, all interactions should be doable by multiple means—for instance, it should be possible to use your site exclusively with the keyboard or exclusively with the mouse.
Understandable: Users should be able to understand the content and interface. Make use of appropriate labels, include instructions, and so on.
Robust: The interface should work reliably with different systems. A website should work well in all major browsers (and versions), for instance. And in terms of accessibility, it should work well with screen readers, head-tracking devises and other assistive technologies.
Interestingly, these guidelines are eminently compatible—and in some cases overlapping with—standard usability guidelines, such as Nielsen’s usability heuristics. For example, the heuristic “Match between system and real world” is essentially about the system being “Understandable” in the sense above.
So in the spirit of the curb cut effect, following these guidelines ensures that an interface is not only usable by people with disabilities, but maximally usable by everyone.
Ports of Call
A Lord of the Rings Anime: A new feature-length Lord of the Rings installment is coming this Christmas: an anime by the maker of Ghost in the Shell. The trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim came out this week. The new season of Rings of Power comes out soon, too.
Baking Soda for Endurance: The positive effect of baking soda on human endurance has been established in research since the 1980s, and over the past few years we’ve seen more athletes experimenting with it—and new products—notably at this year’s Olympics. We’ll see if this is a fad or if baking soda products become an endurance staple. (Caveat: Consuming baking soda straight can cause stomach upset, which is what the new products are trying to find ways around.)