Can everyone see that okay?

There’ve been a flurry of posts on social media over the past couple of weeks as people have shared news that their IATEFL proposals have been accepted for the Harrogate conference in April. I got mine too and although I won’t start planning my session until much nearer the time, it has got me thinking about an issue that’s been on my mind for a while.

Now you’ll have to bear with me a bit here, but the relevance of my story will gradually become clear …

I’ve been short-sighted since I was a kid and I’ve been wearing contact lenses since I was in my teens. It’s never been a big deal, just one of those things that I barely think about. Then a few years ago, I started struggling to read small print, like the teeny-tiny writing on the back of food packets, and I realized that as well as being short-sighted (not able to see things far away), I was starting to get long-sighted (not able to see things close-up). It’s really common in people around my age and like many of my friends, I bought myself a pair of cheap off-the-shelf reading glasses. I didn’t use them very much, except for reading those pesky cooking instructions. Anyway, when I visited my optician for a regular eye check, we chatted about it and he explained that if he updated my contact lens prescription (which slowly nudges up from time to time), then he’d make the close reading even worse. We agreed to compromise and leave the prescription as it was for the time being.

 

Over the next couple of years, I rubbed along okay, but I did start to notice that my ability to see certain things at a distance was getting a bit worse. It was mostly reading relatively small things a long way off, like the information boards in airports and train stations. And this is where IATEFL comes in … When I went to IATEFL in Belfast in May this year, I had a double whammy – not only did I take numerous trains to get there, and have to squint to read the boards, but when I got to the conference, I also found I couldn’t read a lot of presenters’ slides. It depended a bit on the size of the room and where I sat, but in some of the larger rooms, I had to give up even trying – they were just a smudgy blur.

It got me thinking about presentation slides and accessibility. I can’t have been the only audience member with less-than-perfect eyesight, and it did really change the experience of some talks. Here are a few of my reflections:

Background really makes a difference: It may be boring, but bold black text against a white background really was the easiest to read. Text on a coloured background, or worse still over an image, was really hard to make out.

Bigger is better: We all get told in basic presentations skills courses that we should use a minimum of 20-point text, but we don’t always stick to it. I know I’m guilty of it myself, especially when I’m presenting materials and want to show an extract from a book. It’s tough to show what you want without it coming out a bit smaller than you’d like. And well, corpus lines are just impossible! I’m not sure what the answer is here. I have tried having one slide that shows the design and layout of the material, but then a follow-up slide that pulls out just a couple of lines of text I want to focus on in a clearer format.

Reading from slides: I noticed that when I couldn’t see slides, sometimes it didn’t make any difference to following the talk, because they were just backing up what the presenter was saying. Occasionally though, the presenter would actually ask the audience to read something on a slide without reading it out for them. It’s a useful presenting technique that allows for a bit of a change of pace, gives the audience a bit of thinking time and allows them to mull something over without you talking over them, or maybe facilitates a talk-to-your-neighbour task. It’s also good for highlighting ambiguity or for word play where reading something out would give away the punchline. I don’t really know how you make those moments more accessible, except perhaps to ensure that anything your audience needs to read – as opposed to the stuff that just supports what you’re saying – is extra large and extra clear.

Anyway, getting back to my own story, I was back at my opticians recently and we agreed that maybe it was time to bite the bullet and fully correct my short sight. When I got my new prescription contact lenses, it was fabulous to have the world back in focus again! But as the optician had warned, it really threw out my close-up vision. It was no longer just the tiny small print, I struggled to read my phone and worse still, I could no longer see my computer monitor clearly. So, I’ve bought myself a second pair of specs so that I can have one pair that float around the house and another pair that stay permanently on my desk, and that I’m getting used to wearing full-time when I’m working.

I went for really big specs to use at my desk because the blur in my peripheral vision with my older, smaller ones felt distracting

 

Thanks to my updated prescription, I know that the slides at talks I attend in Harrogate are all going to be super-crisp, but I’m going to try to hang on to my blurry Belfast experiences when I’m designing my slides.