Accessible Books - Text Legibility
“It’s me (non-legible text in picture books), hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”
I’m talking about accessible books again and I won’t stop until every person that wants to read has an easy way to do so.
I think a lot about how to make books more accessible, especially as I am always looking for books that fit my eldest’s needs, which I am aware are specific. But as I think more about this topic and delve deeper into the world of SEN and accessibility, I am increasingly convinced that to make regular commercial books more accessible, there are some very simple and basic things that I know that all publishers can take into account when designing their books.
The problem is that unless you know, are told or learn through experience, you don’t know, and how could you be expected to know? Hopefully, this is where I can come in, and I play a small part in being part of a change by using the intersection of my professional and personal life, along with my genetic gifts of being a loud, big-mouthed, passionate soul to let everyone know.
When I sit and read books I’ve worked on with my children, I notice things in those books (that I am incredibly proud to have worked on) that make them inaccessible for low vision and I think back to the decisions made then, I know I wouldn’t make the same ones now. Although that’s uncomfortable sometimes, time marches ever forward, and only forwards, so I didn’t know then what I know now, so I try to think of these things now as steps on my journey upwards to experience. As I have mentioned many times, there is a dark humour in the fact that I have a child who is a prolific reader, who lives in a home full of books but they are unable to access over half of them.
The issue I wanted to point out in this post, is a simple and easy change that can be accounted for in every picture book design going forward, and only require a slight money and time cost to make the change for reprint.
It’s text legibility and the main culprit I see consistently is black text on a dark, blue, dark blue or navy background. Example below, with the added caveat that Little People, Big Dreams is one of my favourite ranges of books. We read them daily, and mostly are OK from a legibility perspective.
‘Aryton Senna, Little People Big Dreams’ — Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
Although the text looks reasonably clear in the photo, at bedtime in low light, the black text on the navy background is difficult to see. And for those with low vision, there is not a lot of contrast between the black text and background, so would be hard work to see, if not impossible to distinguish between the two, let alone pick out the shapes of the letters.
There are some beautiful picture books, ones we love in our home, with full-bleed nighttime scenes where black text is put over a dark background, which makes reading difficult for people of all vision abilities, including me who has never worn glasses and has healthy eyes. It is particularly problematic when we are snuggling and reading together at bedtime, with cosy low lighting because it is nearly impossible to see the black text on a dark background at all in this scenario. And if you can’t see part of the text on a book in the regular reading environment, then what’s the point?
When I have come across this issue in my career, I remember it being argued that the choice to have black text on a dark background was an aesthetic one; it would be argued that a cut-out of the image wouldn’t look great, or spoil the flow of the image or perhaps wasn’t allowed (in my experience, by licensors). An often suggested solution was to add a translucent ‘ghosted’ box behind the text, which isn’t the most attractive solution and sometimes doesn’t even increase legibility by that much.
White text is often an easy and solid solution, but is rarely viable (in my experience anyway) from a cost point of view in a global for markets of books which need to be co-editionable.
‘Meet the Planets’ by Caryl Hart, Illustrated by Bethan Woolvin, Bloomsbury
This is a great example of how well white text on a dark background can work, and have legible text that is part of the whole design. The pulled-out text is really playful, and the eye is led two paragraphs of text easily.
When the sole reason to have the text in the first place is to read it, there’s really little or no excuse for it not to be legible. As a society we are becoming more aware of the differing needs of children and people around how they experience and react to the world around them, and this includes how they read and experience stories and books. In terms of accessibility for books, what was once was perceived (to the best of our knowledge at the time) to be a small market, in what I believe is as a positive change in our world as we are all becoming more aware of different needs, so it is increasingly becoming larger market and publishers need to adapt the books they produce to accommodate accordingly.
As I see it, an easy change for picture books is just to ensure the text is on a clear, texture-free background, with text colour and background in contrasting colours. I have been incredibly surprised to see how often this just isn’t the case. This will not only help those with low vision see text more easily, it will also help unconfident readers and those with different needs, to more easily navigate the page, give them an uncluttered space as they learn to identify letters and recognise words and result in more lifelong readers, which is beneficial for society (and profit margins).
Some examples where text legibility is an issue are shown above. Note: these are just some books I picked from our shelves earlier today. These are all books we love and read often, but these pages in particular, my eldest can not see, and we have ways to work around it and we do. I wanted to show them here to illustrate some common problems I find in books, but also to illustrate how a large percentage of books my eldest likes, reads and enjoys are, in fact, inaccessible to them:
‘The Gruffalo’s Child’, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Macmillan.
The snowflakes and snow texture behind and immediately around the text makes the text difficult to see and focus on.
‘Gigantosaurus’ by Jonny Duddle, Templar Publishing.
The clouds behind the text on the right-handside of the spread make the text difficult to see and focus on. There is also a lot of black text on a dark green background in this book that’s difficult to see.
‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers, Harper Collins.
The text along the waves, with the varying colours, and the dark navy and blue being very close in colour to the black text makes this very difficult to see.
’The Body Book’, by Dr Bipasha Choudhury, DK.
A lot of this book is visually really legible, but I find a lot of the more educational, factual style of books tend to, but on the right-handside, the black text on the red background is difficult to see, especially in context with the red blood cell images, it makes the whole flash difficult to distinguish.
In these same books, there are also examples of where text legibility and design work really well together, shown below. But when legibility isn’t clear on every page, it mars the enjoyment of the book as a whole, or in our case, a reasonable percentage of it. It interrupts the flow of what you’re reading and the story you’re telling, and children deserve fully legible, accessible and easily readable books.
