Good Design is Accessible: Foundations of Accessibility

Meggan Van Harten is Design de Plume's Strategic Leader and our accessibility expert. She actively promotes accessibility through mentorship, teaching both clients and students the importance of inclusive design.

According to the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD), 6.2 million Canadians aged 15 and older have a disability. Accessible design isn’t just another box to tick for moral or legal reasons; it’s a necessity when using graphic design to communicate with a diverse audience that is approaching our content in different ways.

By considering our use of colours, typography, language, and even the delivery method for the content, we can create graphic design work that is as accessible as possible for the intended audience. Today, we’re sharing a few important accessibility tips from Meggan to help your communications serve the full spectrum!

1. Alt Text

Alt text is a short written description of an image. Screen-reading software can read out loud these descriptions to people, making it possible to experience a website or document fully. For alt text to be useful, focus on the following:

• Write a detailed and useful description, rather than focusing on too many keywords
• Add context to your description by referring to the page topic and including relevant details to make your alt text more specific
• Omit filler words such as “image of” or “photo of,” and keep your description to 125 characters or less

2. Lists

A good list presents important information succinctly. To make your list accessible to all people, it must be designed with screen-reading software in mind. When designing lists, keep the following points in mind:

• Use bullets or numbers to structure your list
• Use recognized glyphs for bullet lists to ensure that a screen reader recognizes the icon as a bullet
• If a bullet requires additional information, nest it under the primary bullet using the appropriate glyph or numbering convention (ex. 1.a, 1.1)

3. Contrast

Colour contrast refers to the difference in brightness between the foreground and background of a document or image. When designing text and backgrounds, use contrasting colours to make the text more legible for colour-blind and/or low-vision people, as well as for those who are interacting with your content in different circumstances (for example, outside on a sunny day).

In most instances, the recommended contrast ratio for digital content is 4.5:1. Factors such as font size, information hierarchy, or text emphasis may influence your decision to diverge from this recommended ratio (for example, a 3:1 ratio for large-scale text).?

4. Testing

By using multiple tools to verify our designs, we can understand how others might experience our content and detect errors in advance.

Listen to your document through a screen reader to check for errors or inconsistencies. While using screen-reading software to verify a document, Meggan kept hearing the words “yin-yin” repeated over and over again, even though these words did not appear in the text. This was due to a bullet encoding error. She was able to correct this issue before it affected the end user.

There are also different ways to test your project’s contrast. For more information, please check out the @Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD)’s AccessAbility 2: A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design.

Don’t forget to follow Design de Plume on Instagram for more accessible and inclusive design tips! https://www.instagram.com/design_de_plume/