Designing for Students with Special Needs

By Deborah Kubecka, Creative Director

There is a world of design that exists for special needs students that is not taught in university but is rather learned by the designer in the hands-on world of special needs education and publishing. Because there are so many different kinds of students with special needs, we don’t have a “one design fits all” system. Although designing for our students requires simple and straightforward aesthetics, the thought behind the design is not simple. We tailor our design process to consider the age, grade level, and intellectual level of the student for each product, the goal being to produce on-level, clean design.

“Simple” can be hard to achieve. Designers edit themselves much in the same way an author does. We ask ourselves “At what point does the interesting/pretty/colorful graphic just get in the way? Is it necessary? Does it provide clarification for the student? Does it support the copy/worksheet or does it compete with it? Especially when designing for students with intellectual disabilities, “Simple” cannot be abstract – the graphics must be recognizable, the copy must be legible.

It is important to see the product through the eyes of the student and we learn to design for this special population from our teachers and from the students themselves. Generally, for design purposes, we break our audience into two groups—those students who have learning disabilities, (i.e., the student who may be in 7th grade but who is reading on a 3rd grade level) and those students with varying degrees of Intellectual disabilities. Because disabilities span all ages, our products have to address the disability as well as the age of the target population.

Three of my favorite sayings follow:

A picture is worth a thousand words
• Visual support for the copy/text helps the reader to identify a word or provides a clue as to the meaning of that word or paragraph.
• The imagery needs to be recognizable—not too abstract or stylized.
• Color-coding can play a large role when trying to clarify a pattern or concept.

What you don’t say can be as important as what you do say
The use of negative space is one of our most valuable tools. It provides a “breather” for the student, makes the page less intimidating, and asks the student to focus on the important elements of a page.
Some of the ways we accomplish this are:
• Wider side margins (shorter column widths)
• An uncluttered page—no unnecessary objects on the page.
• Every element should have a purpose.

Bigger is Better (sometimes)
Fonts
• Because fonts vary in legibility, we have no hard and fast rules dictating a certain font or size, except that they be, without doubt, legible.
• We stay away from display fonts for body copy and are carefully selective in our use of them for titles and headlines.
• Age appropriate —typically larger font sizes are used more for Elementary products than for Secondary and Adult products.
• Math products and many worksheets can vary widely in font size.

Leading
• Generally we allow more leading, but not so much that the lines of type become disjointed causing the student to lose his or her train of thought.
• Leading should be comfortable, flowing.

We try to use all of these techniques in a subtle way so as to not emphasize the differences of our special needs students from the general ed population. We hope that our designs will be clean, interesting, fresh, appropriate, and above all, help the student in his learning process.