![]() Perhaps a little confusingly, those colour variables are not given in HTML, but in Hex. The table in the middle of the article states that the two colours tested are black (000000) & creme (FAFAC8), so that’s what we’ll be using. As the article notes, that happens to coincide with the recommendations of the British Dyslexia Association. ![]() The results of that (admittedly small) study suggest that black text on a creme background is the most effective combination. But according to the W3C article I linked to above, simple (hehe) black text on a white background isn’t necessarily the best colour scheme to use if you want to improve readability for people with dyslexia. The default background colour for the Simple theme is white, and if you’re okay with that, feel free to ignore this section. Deckset requires you to change each element separately, which means a little more work to change the whole theme, but has some distinct advantages, as I’ll describe below. If you then click on the ‘Add Custom Style’ button, you’ll be presented with a list of elements which you can, well, customise. ![]() Once you’ve changed the slides to the Simple theme, click on the ‘Customise’ button at the top right, which will open the ‘Customise Theme’ pane. This kind of ’smart layout’ is one of the big reasons why I like using Deckset :). For example, if you have a slide which just contains a header and no text at all, Deckset will place it in the very centre of the slide but once you add text below the header, the slide is rearranged so that the header is now at the top of the slide. ![]() While I think my favourite default theme is Merriweather, the Simple theme works well as a basis, and includes a lot of the more subtle features that I like about Deckset. For the OpenDyslexic theme I want to make, I’ll be customising the ’Simple’ theme. Open any set of slides in Deckset and click on the ‘Themes’ button on the menu to reveal all of the available themes. This guide as a pdf, formatted using the OpenDyslexic theme in Deckset.I’ve also uploaded two resources which you may find helpful: In addition, you should read this W3C article on the optimal colours to improve readability for people with dyslexia. So, to follow this guide you need to be using at least v2.0 of Deckset, and have both OpenDyslexic and OpenDyslexic3 installed (I’ll explain why you need both later). To be honest, I’d still like to have a little more customisation, but while the built-in interface doesn’t allow you complete control, it’s certainly enough for what I want to do here. The original release of Deckset offered a selection of about twenty predesigned themes to choose from, but with the release of v2.0, all the themes can be customised. This allows you to concentrate on the content of the slides rather than tweaking the layout. What this means, practically, is that you create your slides in a normal text file using Markdown, then open the file in Deckset, which converts the text into slides and takes care of layout. So this article is a guide to making an OpenDyslexic template for my favourite presentation software, Deckset.ĭeckset ($29) is a Markdown-based presentation application for Mac. ![]() And even though I’m not dyslexic, I find OpenDyslexic pleasant to read, having read a couple of Kindle books using it (the typeface comes bundled with the app, at least on iOS). In an effort to be more careful with design choices on my slides, I decided that I wanted to use OpenDyslexic in my presentations next semester. OpenDyslexic is a typeface designed “to help with some of the symptoms of dyslexia.” A freely available, open source project created by Abbie Gonzalez, the aim OpenDyslexic is to address “contrast/blindness, letter confusion or rotation, and crowding”. ![]()
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