Animated Step-by-Steps™ are designed to address literacy, language and AAC (if you've purchased a symbol-supported version). When the Animated Step-by-Steps™ were originally designed I
chose the AbcPrint
font as I felt it emulated printed text, making it appropriate for early literacy training. Although I loved the simplicity of
this ‘print’ font, I must admit I’ve always been a bit disappointed that bold AbcPrint is just not as bold as
I’d like.
It’s funny how you can think you know an application such as
PowerPoint (given the fact that you use it almost every day), then ‘trip
across’ a valuable feature that you didn’t realize existed. Recently, that is
exactly what happened to me.
My first
discovery was the ability to add a shadow to text to make it appear bolder. Although I was aware of the fact that I could
add a shadow to text, I had never thought of using it to emulate bolder text. As
you can see, it did make the text look bolder
… but it also made the text look a bit fuzzy …. not exactly what I wanted for early literacy.
I then discovered, quite by accident, another feature that
did turn out to be a productive path. PowerPoint allows you to outline text with lines of varying weights. As you can see below, this
option produces text that is in fact bolder, without the detriment of being
fuzzy.
Caution: You have to be careful using this feature.
Too thick an outline (determined by assigned line weight) can make the individual letters less distinct.
Although you are unable to make the text of existing Animated Step-by-Steps bolder (the page text is not editable since it's a graphic), moving forward I will be adding a 1pt outline to the page text hoping the text will be more
legible for 'beginning readers’ and more appropriate for children with mild visual
challenges.
Hopefully this information will be valuable for authors wishing to create content using a bolder version of the AbcFont!
…’til the next post …
(new posts every Monday)
Visit my website http://www.animatedstep-by-steps.com
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©2016 Carol Goossens’, Ph.D.
Augmentative Communication Consultant
Speech-Language Pathologist
Special Educator
