Rethinking How a Trek Story Is Read
Project
Dyslexia-friendly reading experience
Year
2026
Around one in ten people read differently. For them, long-form articles are quietly exhausting dense blocks, cramped lines, glaring white pages, and no way to change any of it. Most pages that call themselves "accessible" stop at colour contrast and alt text and leave it there.
So I rebuilt the reading experience from the type up: a calm, legibility-first article with a live toolbar text size, line and letter spacing, font, colour tint, and a reading ruler plus read-aloud that highlights each word as it goes. Then I proved it on real content, my own single-day trek up Kudremukh, and took the whole thing to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Scope of Work
01 THE SHORT VERSION
PROBLEM
Around one in ten people read differently. Long-form articles turn into hard work: dense blocks, cramped lines, glaring white pages, and no way to change any of it.
WHAT I DID
Designed an order pad that sits under the live chart, then shipped one pattern across spot, options and futures., with a mode for each way traders actually place orders.
WHERE IT LANDED
Shipped to iOS and Android inside the month. Product reported roughly a fifth of active traders had switched it on in the first month.
A Dyslexia-Friendly Rewrite of a Trek Story
I wrote a short article about a day trek in the Western Ghats, then re-set it against WCAG 2.2 and the British Dyslexia Association’s style guide. This is what a real piece of writing not a lorem-ipsum mockup looks like once every guideline is actually applied.
Most accessibility write-ups use a paragraph of filler text to show a rule in action. I wanted to see what the rules actually do to real writing, so I used one of my own articles as the test subject: a trek log about climbing Kudremukh, in Karnataka’s Western Ghats. It already had the two things that make dyslexia guidance hard to apply after the fact long narrative paragraphs, and a run of photo captions.
The brief I set myself: keep every word of the story, and rebuild only how it’s presented, using two sources the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, and the British Dyslexia Association’s (BDA) style guide, which predates WCAG and is written specifically for this.
What the research says
WCAG covers dyslexia only indirectly, inside success criteria written for a wider range of disabilities. The BDA guide covers it directly, but predates WCAG and carries no legal weight. Used together, they cover both the rule and the reason behind it.
BRITISH DYSLEXIA ASSOCIATION · STYLE GUIDE
Sans-serif, evenly spaced type. Twelve to fourteen point minimum for body text.
Left-aligned, ragged right edge never justified.
Sixty to seventy characters a line.
Cream or soft background, never stark white.
Bold for emphasis, never italics or underlines both blur under visual stress.
Headings at least 20% larger than body text, in sentence case, not block capitals.
What changed in the article
Every row below maps a guideline straight to an edit in “One Long Day on Kudremukha” - nothing here is generic.
Guideline | Change made |
|---|---|
WCAG 1.4.12 + BDA spacing | 1.65 line height and paragraph gaps at 2× type size by default and the layout still holds when a browser-enforced 1.4.12 override pushes spacing further. The “Two lone trees” section no longer reads as one dense block. |
BDA line length | Measure capped at 68 characters, so the drive-up paragraph never runs past a comfortable eye-sweep. |
BDA alignment | Left-aligned throughout, including the “hike or trek” pull-quote nothing centered, nothing justified. |
BDA background / WCAG 1.4.3 | Warm off-white ground behind dark text, clear of the glare a stark white page gives on a six-minute read. |
BDA emphasis | Bold replaces italics. The original draft italicized “puliyogare” on every mention; that got pulled out. |
BDA lists over prose | The closing “If you go” advice became a bulleted list instead of one long paragraph. |
WCAG 1.1.1 · Non-text Content | Every photo homestay, bajjis, both Onti Mara trees, the peak marker got a plain-language alt description, not a repeat of its caption. |
WCAG 1.4.4 + 1.4.10 | Checked at 200% browser zoom text reflows into a single readable column with no horizontal scrolling and nothing clipped. |
None of this touched a sentence of the original story. The edit was entirely about presentation type, spacing, alignment, and how the photos are described. That’s the point of using a real article instead of a demo paragraph: the fixes have to survive contact with an actual sentence about tea, rain, and a bowl of rice, not just a style guide’s sample text.
Sources: WCAG 2.2 Text Spacing, Visual Presentation, British Dyslexia Association Style Guide, 2023.