Merative Ideas Portal
Shape the future of Merative!
We invite you to shape the future of Merative, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:
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Start by posting ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,
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The Merative team may need your help to refine the ideas so they may ask for more information or feedback. The offering manager team will then decide if they can begin working on your idea. If they can start during the next development cycle, they will put the idea on the priority list. Each team at Merative works on a different schedule, where some ideas can be implemented right away, others may be placed on a different schedule.
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Hi Kate,
We have reviewed your enhancement suggestion and acknowledge its benefit. However, other features are taking priority in our planning at this time.
Here is some feedback from our research as this is a very interesting topic to look into.
According to Understood, a non-profit organisation that support people with learning and thinking differences:
• Lots of people prefer using “dyslexia fonts” over other fonts.
• These fonts don’t improve reading.
• But they do have features that may help reading feel more comfortable for some people.
Here are two studies that found that dyslexic specialised fonts made no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students/children with dyslexia:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629233/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5934461/
So offering this choice to users may not actually provide any tangible benefits. But that said, in theory, web users can specify their own user stylesheets could specify a different font but this would be unsupported and somewhat difficult to author given how our current font is specified in the styles.
Here is the British Dyslexia Association Dyslexia friendly style guide: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide
This Style Guide provides principles that can help ensure that written material considers the difficulties experienced by some dyslexic people and allows for the use of text to speech to facilitate ease of reading. Adopting best practices for dyslexic readers has the advantage of making all written communication easier on the eye for everyone.
Generally, the guidelines are just good practice for all users. If you read through the guidelines I'll highlight a few things we already do that match up with the guidelines.
- IBM Plex is a sans-serif typeface. Each glyph in the entire Plex family has been TrueType hinted (i.e. optimized for on-screen legibility in small sizes)
- The spacing inside the letterforms of IBM Plex make them more identifiable and aid legibility, especially at small sizes.
- The Plex Italics were engineered according to specific angles that work best with pixels to get the smoothest on-screen rendering.
- Our smallest font size is 12px for labels and most body text is 14px. Browser zoom is supported to increase this based on user preference
- Letter spacing of typestyles in Carbon (some of which we've adopted in v8) has been specifically chosen for each style based on font size to ensure legibility. We have made improvements in v8 to better support varying lengths of text so user changes to letter spacing won't cause other issues. Support for users changing letter-spacing without loss of functionality is an accessibility requirement we strive towards.
- Line-height of typestyles in Carbon (some of which we've adopted in v8) has been specifically chosen for each style based on font size and line length to ensure legibility. Where we have adopted Carbon text styles (labels, form controls), we have increased the space between lines of text which
- We ensure to create visual hierarchy using font size for headings, bold for emphasis, space around headings and ensure hyperlinks look different from surrounding text.
- We ensure sufficient colour contrast between text and backgrounds and only use single colour backgrounds (i.e. not patterned)
- We left-align text, avoiding centre-aligned text and don't use justification
- We use layouts and containers to avoid overly long line length
- We use white space to remove clutter near text and group related content.
- We avoid all caps text, instead using title and sentence case.
Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us. Although we cannot pursue all of the submitted suggestions, we are committed to involving our users in building our product roadmap and appreciate your ideas.
Regards,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.
Hi Kate,
Sorry for the delay in our reply to your request. We are getting advice from our experts in this area and will get back to you very soon.
Thank you,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.
Hi Kate,
Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us. We are committed to involving our users in building our product roadmap and appreciate your suggestions.
We will review the information you have provided and get back to you within 30 days. If additional details are required in order to complete our evaluation, we will send you a request for more information.
Thank you,
Shane McFadden, SPM Offering Management team
You can find more information on the request process here.