Ensure that the remote control can be used by people who have difficulty reading or understanding text or symbols

Rationale

People with low literacy, reading disorders, cognitive or intellectual impairments may have difficulty reading, understanding and remembering text and graphical symbols that are not simple, familiar and unambiguous.

There are different buttons, you get confused with them. There’s different buttons for different things.

Guidelines survey respondent.

Directions and techniques

Make text labels and icons simple and intuitive (high priority)

Icons or button shapes on the remote control should correspond to the icons used on screen. This will make it much easier for people to identify the right button without having to read a label or understand a symbol.

Standard icons & labels should be used wherever possible, so that associations previously learned on other products can be applied without the need for new learning. An example is the use of the standard italic ‘i’ for information. For guidance, refer to the online database ofGraphical Symbols for Use on Equipment (requires password) which is maintained by IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation).

Figure 9. European standard access symbols for subtitling, audio description, signing, spoken output and voice commands, from ETSI.

Maximise information by using both graphical symbols and text labels

Buttons should have easily recognisable and memorable graphical symbols as an aid for people who have difficulty understanding or reading text. Similarly, text labels should also be provided for people who have difficulty understanding or remembering symbols.

How you could test for this

To find out whether text labels and graphical symbols are easily read, it is necessary to run tests with people who might have difficulty, including people with vision impairments, cognitive impairments, intellectual impairments or reading disorders. Tests should encompass understanding, distinguishing and remembering. This is often referred to as ‘guessability’ and ‘learnability’.