Enhance every digital experience by designing for accessibility. These tips will teach you how to create inclusive designs for people with disabilities.
With over a billion people around the world living with some form of disability, it’s important for designers to ensure they’re creating spaces, visuals, products, and interfaces that allow for everyone, including impaired users, to fully participate and live with independence and dignity.
Accessible design is essential for creating an equitable and inclusive society for all. It’s not just a trend—it’s a necessity.
What Does Accessibility Mean?
Accessibility refers to the practice of ensuring that products, services, and environments are usable by people with disabilities. This can include physical disabilities, sensory impairments, cognitive limitations, and other factors that may impact a person’s ability to navigate and interact with different aspects of daily life.
In the context of design, accessibility means creating products, websites, buildings, and other elements that are inclusive and usable for people of all abilities.
Why Does Accessibility Matter?
Accessibility in design is crucial because it ensures that everyone, regardless of ability or disability, can use and interact with products and environments.
By creating accessible designs, we are making it possible for people with disabilities to navigate and utilize technology, buildings, and services independently.
This not only promotes inclusion and equal opportunities, but also reflects a commitment to social responsibility and ethical design practices.
License these images via Ground Picture, fizkes, and Motortion Films.
Considering accessibility in the early stages of design can ultimately lead to better and more innovative solutions for all users.
In addition, as the population ages, the need for accessible design becomes even more pressing. By incorporating accessibility features into our designs, we are not only meeting the needs of individuals with disabilities, but also creating a better experience for everyone.
Ultimately, prioritizing accessibility in design is a step towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society for all.
What Are Assistive Devices?
Assistive devices are tools, technology, and equipment designed to help individuals with disabilities perform tasks that may be challenging for them otherwise. These devices are specifically designed to improve functional capabilities, increase mobility, promote independence, and enhance the overall quality of life for people with disabilities.
Some examples of assistive devices include screen readers for individuals with visual impairments, magnifiers for those with low vision, and hearing aids for individuals with hearing loss.
Screen readers help individuals access digital content by converting text into speech or Braille, while magnifiers enlarge text or images on a screen or printed material. Hearing aids amplify sounds for individuals with hearing loss, allowing them to communicate more effectively in various environments.
Other commonly used assistive devices in the digital world include speech-to-text software, adaptive keyboards, and alternative input devices such as sip-and-puff systems for individuals with limited mobility. These assistive devices play a crucial role in creating an inclusive and accessible digital environment for people with disabilities.
9 Tips for Creating Accessible Design
When designing products and environments, it’s important to consider accessibility. Meeting a platform’s accessibility standards and supporting its assistive technology gives users an efficient experience. Be sure you’re staying up-to-date with accessibility standards, as they evolve over time.
Designing with accessibility in mind not only ensures that a broader range of users can access the designed space or product, but it also demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and equality.
Whether you’re designing a website, a physical space, or a product, incorporating accessibility features is essential.
Below are nine tips for designing with accessibility in mind.
1. Make Sure Your Foreground and Background Colors Have Enough Contrast
Ensuring sufficient contrast between foreground and background is vital for accessibility because it ensures that text and images are easily distinguishable for everyone, including those with visual impairments.
By providing sufficient contrast, people with low vision or color blindness can more easily read and understand content. This is especially important for digital platforms, where users rely on screens to consume information. Without adequate contrast, content can be difficult or impossible to read, making it inaccessible for a significant portion of the population.
By prioritizing sufficient contrast, designers and developers can create a more inclusive and accessible experience for all users, regardless of their visual abilities. This small but impactful change can make a big difference in ensuring that digital content is universally accessible and usable for everyone.
When designing, use a color contrast checker to ensure that the colors used in your work have adequate contrast. By using a color contrast checker, designers can ensure that their content meets accessibility guidelines, such as those set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)—making their designs more inclusive for a wider audience.
2. Avoid Relying Solely on Color to Communicate Information
When creating any kind of visual design, it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone processes information in the same way. This is particularly true when it comes to relying solely on color to convey important information.
Using color alone to convey information can lead to exclusion and miscommunication for those who are colorblind or have visual impairments.
Consider alternative methods, such as using patterns, textures, labels, or symbols in addition to color to ensure that all users are able to understand and interpret the information being presented.
By incorporating multiple elements to convey information, designers can create a more inclusive and accessible experience for all users, which is essential in creating a positive and effective communication design.
3. Make Sure Interactive Elements Are Easy to Find
By making interactive elements—like buttons, links, and forms—easily distinguishable, it allows users who rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers to navigate and interact with the content more effectively. This can include using clear visual cues such as contrasting colors, underlining links, or using larger or bolder text for buttons.
Additionally, providing alternative text for images and descriptive labels for form fields can further enhance the usability of interactive elements for individuals with disabilities.
Ensuring that interactive elements are easy to identify not only improves the overall user experience for all individuals, but also promotes inclusivity and accessibility for those with visual impairments or other disabilities, ultimately making the digital environment more equitable for all users.
Clear and consistent navigation options are important for accessibility because they help users to easily move through a website or app and find the information they need. By providing clear navigation menus, headings, and links, users with disabilities, like visual impairments and motor skill limitations, can more effectively navigate the content.
Consistent navigation options across all pages also help users to predict where they can find certain elements, reducing confusion and frustration.
This is especially important for accessibility, as it ensures that all users, regardless of their abilities, can easily access and interact with the content.
It also aligns with accessibility guidelines, which emphasize the importance of providing clear and consistent navigation options to ensure a positive user experience for everyone.
5. Use Clearly Associated Labels for Form Elements
When designing web forms, ensure your form elements include clearly associated labels. This is important for accessibility because it helps users who rely on screen readers or keyboard navigation to understand the purpose of each form field.
Clear and descriptive labels also benefit users with cognitive disabilities or those who may have trouble comprehending the layout of a form.
Additionally, correctly associated labels make it easier for all users to accurately and efficiently complete the form, leading to a more satisfying user experience.
6. Group Content Using Headings and Spacing
By using headings, proper HTML tags, and strategic spacing, users with disabilities can easily navigate and understand the content. This also benefits all users by creating a more organized and visually appealing layout.
Overall, the use of headings and spacing, along with proper HTML tags, ensures that content is well-organized and accessible to all.
7. Include Image and Media Options in Your Design
When designing a website or content that includes audio, video, or complex visual elements, provide visible links to audio transcripts, audio-described versions of videos, and captions for tables or complex graphs. Work closely with content authors and developers to ensure that these alternatives for non-text content are readily available and easily accessible to all users.
Additionally, use robust alternative text for images to succinctly describe them, making sure not to replicate the caption or use alt text for purely decorative images. This will ensure that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and understand the content, thereby improving inclusivity and user experience.
8. Use Alt Text When Possible
Alt text—aka alternative text—plays a vital role in making media content accessible to all users, including those with visual impairments. By providing a succinct and descriptive summary of an image, video, or other media, alt text enables screen reading software to convey information to users who can’t see it.
Crafting effective alt text involves providing a clear and concise description of the content, focusing on conveying the essential information and context. For example, if the image is of a red apple on a table, the alt text could be “a ripe red apple resting on a wooden table.”
Including targeted keywords in alt text not only improves accessibility—it also enhances search engine optimization (SEO). By incorporating relevant keywords related to the content, alt text can help search engines understand the context of the media, thus increasing the likelihood of it being discovered by relevant users.
Additionally, combining alt text with captions further enhances the accessibility and usability of media content, providing comprehensive information for all users regardless of their abilities.
9. Consider Screen Size
Screen size plays a major role in the usability of screen readers for individuals with visual impairments. Larger screens can display more information at once, allowing sighted users to navigate through content more effectively.
On the other hand, smaller screens require more efficient navigation due to limited display space. This can impact the usability of screen readers as users may need to navigate through more pages or sections to access the same information as on a larger screen.
Additionally, screen size affects the layout and presentation of content. Responsive design becomes essential to ensure that content is displayed and navigable across different screen sizes.
For screen reader users, this means that the layout and presentation of content should adapt to different screen sizes to ensure a consistent and accessible user experience. By considering the impact of screen size on screen reader usability, developers can create more inclusive and user-friendly interfaces for individuals with visual impairments.
Accessibility Does Not Hinder Innovation
Considering accessibility in the design process ensures that products and services can be used by individuals with disabilities or different abilities.
By incorporating accessibility features, designers are forced to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions that cater to the needs of disabled individuals and enhance the overall user experience for everyone. This can lead to the development of new technologies, features, and design elements that benefit a wider range of individuals, ultimately driving innovation in the industry.
The introduction of design constraints through accessibility requirements can inspire designers to think creatively and ultimately lead to the development of better and more inclusive products.
It’s important to emphasize that accessibility is not just about usability; it’s about providing an equitable experience to all individuals, regardless of their disabilities or abilities.
By prioritizing accessibility in the design process, companies can demonstrate their commitment to creating products and services that are accessible to everyone, thus contributing to a more inclusive and equitable society.
Overall, considering accessibility in the design process does not limit innovation. Rather, it fosters a culture of creativity and inclusivity, leading to better products for all users.
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