By Axel Brandt (he/him)

When I was a postdoc, a student approached me with a request I had not received before: they wanted course materials printed on green paper instead of white. Why? As part of a concussion protocol, their physician recommended it as one way to reduce eye strain. Ever since, I have defaulted to printing on green paper instead of white.

This is one of three small changes I have made to my teaching that I believe has had a positive impact—a very large one for some students—on the accessibility of my course materials. This blog post discusses these changes and is structured like a recipe on a food blog, so feel free to scroll past the story part and straight to the how-to part.

The Story Part

This is a collection of three events that impacted my professional practice. For each, we recount my experience and then dig a little into the details of the related visual accessibility topic. Here we go.

Part 1: Concussion Protocol

I was surprised that printing on green paper would lessen eye strain. It turns out that the refraction of light by the lens of our eyes can increase the difficulty to focus on certain colors and combinations. Scientists have studied the wavelengths of light absorbed by the different photoreceptors in a human retina and established that the eye most efficiently detects light at wavelengths of 555 nm in daylight and 507 nm at night. These specific wavelengths correspond to the colors green and cyan.

What can we do? Print on green paper. Having never thought about it before my student’s request, I printed a document on different colors of paper. In comparison to green, I found white to be rather dazzling and blue surprisingly harsh. I was also surprised to learn that viewing the color red is linked to decreased intellectual performance.

Since starting to print on green paper over four years ago, the only request for white paper I have received was part of accommodations for a student with visual impairments needing the high contrast.

Part 2: In Living Color

Some years ago, I learned something about myself while watching tv with a friend. We were watching an episode of “Brain Games” on the Discovery Channel about how our brains process color. It turns out that I’m color blind. Color blindness in most cases is more having difficulty distinguishing between colors than it is seeing in complete grayscale. There are color blindness simulators if you’d like to get a feeling of how it is to have color vision deficiencies.

The National Eye Institute describes three types of color blindness: red-green, blue-yellow, and complete. Red-green is the most common and affects around 8% of males and 0.5% of females in populations with Northern European ancestry, and at lower incidence rates in other populations. Red-green color blindness is most commonly caused by deuteranomaly, which makes green look more red, but can also be caused by protanomaly, which makes red look more green.

What can we do? Change the colors we use. One option is the palette (pictured in the how-to part) from a Nature methods article that had previously been proposed here.

As someone who is both color blind and who has published results in graph colorings, I will say that this palette has been great for my research talks. If you do more with data visualization, there are proposed guidelines that note specific color-blind friendly color schemes.

Part 3: Absent for Prelims

As a PhD student, one of my friends didn’t show up to the first preliminary exam. A frantic, unanswered “where are you” text message added another layer of concern to the exam-taking experience. Later, I would learn that they were taking the exam elsewhere as part of accommodations for their developmental reading disorder, which is commonly referred to as dyslexia.

Dyslexia occurs when areas of the brain that help interpret language do not function properly. It is estimated that perhaps 15-20% of the population as a whole have some of the symptoms of dyslexia, and studies indicate that about 5% of the school age population are classified with a primary learning disability in reading and language processing. Dyslexia may appear with other disorders including developmental writing disorder (dysgraphia) and developmental arithmetic disorder (dyscalculia).

Although most research on supporting students with dyslexia focuses on literacy interventions, there is evidence that the presentation of text has a significant effect on the reading speed of people with dyslexia. This potentially supports an argument that developing a font better fitting the specific needs of individuals with dyslexia could help shift cognitive effort in a helpful way. However, research on specialized fonts has yielded mixed results.

What can we do? Use a font designed for people with dyslexia. There are a variety freely available online. I have been using OpenDyslexic in part due to findings reported in a doctoral poster abstract. When compared to using the Arial font, students ages 7-11 with dyslexia “read significantly more accurately, with fewer errors” when using the OpenDyslexic font. Of interesting note, the abstract mentions that students’ expressed font preferences varied and were not always consistent with empirical data.

I have been using OpenDyslexic for almost five years now and have received unprompted, positive feedback from multiple students with dyslexia. To date, the closest to an unprompted complaint I have received was a question to clarify if the OpenDyslexic zero was a Greek theta. When I have expressly asked people without dyslexia for their opinion on the font, only a couple have complained about having to read more slowly. To this I would note that research suggests hard-to-read fonts could improve learning. That being said, I do make some multi-page documents (e.g. syllabi) available in more condensed fonts for students who want to save paper when printing.

The How-To Part

1. Print on green paper.

Tell future you to either check the green paper box on your print requests or load green pastel paper in your printer. For a shared departmental copier/printer, you can (1) send a secure print that you release from the machine after loading your colored paper, or (2) select a specific tray loaded with green paper as your paper source. Since the bypass tray is typically empty, I send the print job there and load it with green paper. This also avoids surprising a colleague after forgetting to unload colored paper from the default paper tray.

2. Use a color-blind friendly color palette.

One way is to use the RGB codes in the table below to define your colors.

You can create and save a color scheme to use across Microsoft in PowerPoint. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can create a full theme that follows accessibility guidelines and/or uses the Dyslexia friendly font below and this dyslexia friendly style guide.

For LaTeX, feel free to copy/paste the following into the header of your .tex file.

\usepackage{xcolor}

\definecolor{cb1}{RGB}{230,159,0} % orange

\definecolor{cb2}{RGB}{0,158,115} % green

\definecolor{cb3}{RGB}{213,94,0} % red

\definecolor{cb4}{RGB}{86,180,233} % light blue

\definecolor{cb5}{RGB}{0,114,178} % dark blue

\definecolor{cb6}{RGB}{204,121,167} % magenta

\definecolor{cb7}{RGB}{240,228,66} % yellow

3. Use a dyslexia friendly font.

Download the font from the OpenDyslexic website and then install in Windows or Mac iOS. You can then make it the default font for new documents in Word or Pages. Note that the font will revert to Times New Roman or the default font when opened on a device that has not installed OpenDyslexic, so consider saving your PowerPoint slides as a pdf if you may end up using a different computer for a talk.

For LaTeX, you’ll need to compile using XeLaTeX and make sure the “fontspec” package is updated to at least version 2.6c. Then include the following in the header of your .tex file:

\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{OpenDyslexic}

%\setmainfont{OpenDyslexicAlta} %% alternative uses a different letter "a"

\everymath\expandafter{\the\everymath\it}

\everydisplay\expandafter{\the\everydisplay\it}

For beamer slides, also include:

\newfontfamily\OD{OpenDyslexic}

\setbeamerfont{normal text}{size=\fontsize{10}{10}\OD}

\setbeamerfont{frametitle}{size=\fontsize{12}{14}\OD}

\AtBeginDocument{\usebeamerfont{normal text}}

Small Changes with Significant Impact

Spring 2019. First day of Calc 1. The in-class part was the typical community-building and then going over the syllabus. The immediately-after-class part was more of the typical: planned absences for sports, letters from the accessibility office with accommodations, a future medical school applicant already stressed about their grade, and the scramble to get out of the classroom so the next class could get in. Cue hallway conversation with the student who was last in line after letting other students chat with me first, which made me think this would transition to a more private conversation in my office.

Not this time. Just an “unimportant” question they had about the “different” font used on the syllabus, my accessibility-based response to which prompted a question about green paper. Later into the semester this adult-learner—who had dyslexia and a long history of testing anxiety—reported that the small changes made test-taking “less awful” for them, which they clarified to mean that they thought the font and color choices helped but that Calculus was still hard. I may not have been looking for reaffirmation that making those small changes was worth it, but I certainly found some.

Axel Brandt (he/him) is an ardent educator who aspires to facilitate learning through mathematics and embraces playful maths for funsies. He is currently an Assistant Professor at John Carroll University.