Designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy
A GOV.UK Design Notes blog post (28 November 2022) by content designers from DWP Digital and HMRC, introducing dyscalculia and low numeracy as design considerations and presenting a joint DWP/HMRC accessibility poster of concrete dos and don’ts for designing with numbers.
License: Open Government Licence v3.0 — © Crown copyright.
Key points
- Dyscalculia is a persistent difficulty understanding, reading, and working with numbers — affecting money handling, telling/estimating time, understanding percentages, and holding number facts in working memory. Estimated at about 1 in 20 people in the UK, comparable in prevalence to dyslexia (roughly 1 in 10–20), but far less publicly recognized, so most people with it are undiagnosed.
- Low numeracy (short of a diagnosable condition) is far more widespread — affecting roughly half of UK working-age adults (about 17 million people); one in five say they’d avoid a job involving frequent number use. A 2020 Financial Conduct Authority survey found people who’d fallen into debt often felt it could have been avoided had they understood their options better.
- The accessibility poster’s dos and don’ts: round to whole numbers and avoid decimals except for money; leave space around numbers so they don’t visually crowd; pre-fill information the service already holds rather than asking users to re-enter or recall it; add sentence context to bare numbers; allow spaces when entering long numbers; involve people who struggle with numbers directly in the design process. Avoid: overwhelming users with content; unexplained tables/grids of numbers; expecting recall of a number shown only once; timed number entry; and forcing a calculation purely for identity verification.
- The poster was developed with input from the Dyscalculia Network, National Numeracy, and Plain Numbers, and is available in accessible formats from the DWP Accessibility Manual.