Talking with a user about their experiences

Due to being at home with a mending leg (I'm trying to be positive, I don't like to call it a broken leg!) I'm not in direct contact with any of the students I normally support. As part of this course I had hoped to speak with them about their experiences of using technology, in particular if they had any accessibility issues.

Today my uncle popped round to give me a lift to the hospital and we got chatting about his use of technology and being dyslexic, how he adapts his computer to suits his needs. My uncle was diagnosed late in life and it's something we've never really spoken about, even with my background in this area. It was interesting to find out how he's come up with his own method of getting round 'annoying' websites that just 'flash and distract' him. Sometimes, he finds these animated adverts so distracting he can't read the information on the page, so he copies the main text into Word so that he can focus on just the text.

Another strategy he uses is for spelling, over time he has built up his own spelling dictionary which he has saved in a Word document. When he's composing some writing he keeps this document open as a reference, as he knows he has already found the correct spellings of such words. His approach suggests he'd find using a standard dictionary quite difficult. I'm thinking of buying a copy of the ACE Spelling Dictionary to see if he'd find that any easier to use.



I've used the ACE Spelling Dictionary with dyslexic learners before and to be honest I've found it quite useful myself. To find a word you need to listen to how many syllables it's broken up into and listen to the first syllable and what sound it makes. Then you find that sound in the dictionary and the word by the number of syllables. To be honest it's a bit difficult to describe and much simpler to show! If you ever come across a copy of this book, do take a look.

Next our conversation led onto colours, he's found that using a green colour scheme makes it easier to read text and wishes that there was some magic way he could make web pages green. I was able to tell him there is, in the form of an application, I just need to first learn how to use it on this course! So now I have even more motivation to get me going with this, over the next few weeks I'm planning to show him how to create templates in Word and Excel, amend fonts sizes and colours in his browser and look at cover overlay tools.

Instead of looking to my learners for feedback, I should have looked closer to home.

P.S. I've decided I quite like adding images into these blog posts. I'm quite a visual learner, for example I could remember what an ACE Spelling Dictionary looked like, but not what it was called.