Blog
7/5/2024
For Polygon, accessibility is more than an isolated goal or project, it’s an ongoing process of continuous improvement. Accessibility is a fundamental principle underlying the design of all our tools. This is why it was important for us to formulate our company’s commitment to accessibility.
Why does it matter?
Digital accessibility is the ability to access new technologies. This means that we need to explicitly ensure that we design and develop digital tools that every participant (or user) can easily understand, interact with, and navigate.
Our tools are designed for research projects where data is collected from a population. Our main objective when it comes to accessibility is to facilitate access to and use of our tools by participants with disabilities, literacy limitations, or restricted access to technology. Our tools need to be accessible to ensure the diversity, representativeness, and inclusivity of our research participants.
One of our key areas of focus in terms of accessibility has been readability and retention of information. To this end, Polygon adheres to the WCAG accessibility guidelines laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Since content is necessarily supported by typographic characters on a screen, what exactly does W3C recommend in its WCAG 3.0 standard? Are the recommendations appropriate? Can other principles be applied?
In other words, what do we currently know about the ways typography affects how we read and retain information?
We have initiated a new research project at Polygon in collaboration with Luciano Perondi, associate professor at Università Iuav di Venezia and Alessandro Colizzi, associate professor at Politecnico di Milano. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge on how fonts affect readability.
We will be publishing the results of our findings shortly in a scientific review. These results will help us continue to improve our tools’ accessibility.
Knowledge mobilization & scientific writing
Typography, legibility & readability
Accessibility
