Accessibility

Every piece of long-form prose in BoardHerald (updates, resolutions, financials commentary, NDA text, meeting agendas and minutes) renders through a shared component called <BoardProse>. That component honours a set of per-user preferences stored on your profile — change them once, and the whole app responds.

Four controls

1. Font family

Pick the face that works for your eyes. Options:

• System default — Geist / system-ui. Clean, familiar, minimal download.
• Atkinson Hyperlegible — the Braille Institute's typeface, tuned for character distinction (the 1 / l / I / | group is obvious; the b / d / p / q group is clearly differentiated). This is the default for tenants that turn on accessibility features.
• Lexend — designed specifically around reading-proficiency research. Wider letter shapes, more generous spacing. Some readers find Lexend easier than Atkinson on longer passages.
• OpenDyslexic — heavy bottom-weighted glyphs. Opinionated; a subset of readers swear by it, others find it distracting. Try it if the standard faces aren't working.

2. Font size

Four steps: Small, Medium (default), Large, X-Large.

The step affects prose only — navbar, forms, tables, and admin chrome stay on their normal sizes. So you can bump prose to X-Large for reading a long update without the whole app shifting layout underneath you.

3. Line-height

Four steps: Normal (1.7), Loose (1.85), Very Loose (2.1).

Long text at generous leading is easier to track across lines — especially with the larger sizes. Very Loose makes individual sentences feel like a poem, which many readers appreciate for dense material.

4. Prose background

• Dark (default app theme) — white-on-near-black.
• Sepia — warm cream background, dark brown text. Easier on the eyes for long reading sessions; some readers report fewer migraines.
• High contrast — pure white on pure black. Maximum discrimination for readers with low vision.

The background applies only to long-form prose, not the whole app — so you can keep a dark UI while reading on sepia.

Listen — text-to-speech

Every prose surface gets a Listen button. Click it and BoardHerald reads the content aloud. Two backends:

• Server-rendered neural voices — the default for tenants on plans that include TTS. Six voices to pick from, progressive streaming (audio starts before the file is fully generated), and aggressive caching (the same update + voice + speed combination is instant the second time).
• Browser Web Speech API — the fallback when neural TTS isn't available on your plan or when the network is flaky. Voice quality depends on your OS / browser, but it always works offline-after-load.

Controls:

• Speed — granular steps from 1× to 2.5×. Most people settle on 1.25× for updates, 1.5× for financials commentary they're skimming.
• Voice picker — sample each voice with one click before committing.
• Cache indicator — if your selection is cached, a small glyph tells you so; playback starts with zero latency.

Dyslexia-friendly prose rules (baseline)

Even on the default font, BoardProse applies a set of baseline rules that help every reader, not just those with dyslexia:

• Line-height 1.7 minimum — comfortable tracking.
• Max-width 65ch — no prose line longer than your eyes can saccade across in one go.
• Letter-spacing nudged up slightly for small sizes.
• Heading hierarchy uses real semantic <h2> / <h3> — so screen readers navigate by landmark, not by visual size alone.

Screen readers + keyboard nav

BoardHerald targets WCAG 2.2 AA across the app. Every interactive element is keyboard-reachable, every image has alt text (or is marked decorative), every form field has an associated label. The docs site itself aims for the same bar — if you find something unusable with VoiceOver / NVDA, file an issue and we'll fix it.