One in four people in the United States (cdc.gov) and about one in six worldwide (who.int) have a disability. Pause on those statistics for a minute, and imagine a quarter of your audience not being able to access your brand experiences.
Accessibility should be a universal value across an organization, and in particular, a core competency for any design team to ensure people can access the experiences you craft. But we’ve heard a few myths over the years, and we’ll explore how to shift thinking around accessible design.
Accessibility prohibits sparks creativity.
Historically, accessibility has been a great concern for organizations required to meet accessibility requirements by law, but it’s gained wider attention in recent years because of the growing awareness to ensuring diversity and inclusivity.
There is a myth that accessible experiences lack beauty, or that accessibility limits creative potential. This stigma likely stems from examples from sectors that have to abide by accessibility by law. For example, government and bank websites who legally must comply don’t necessarily have a strong reputation for compelling experience design.
I like to flip this idea on its head and look at accessibility as a creative challenge, not a barrier. Accessibility is a set of requirements. All creative projects have requirements, whether you’re designing a website or painting on a canvas or writing a novel.
Working within structure is something creatives are very accustomed to (and some may be brave enough to admit they like it). It can be incredibly fulfilling to solve creative problems and innovate solutions within that structure.
Accessibility is a web team’s everyone’s priority.
Accessibility shouldn’t just be a concern for your web team; that’s too late and you’ve made it an afterthought. Everyone across the organization–and all types of designers, including digital, print, and beyond–should be making accessibility a guiding principle when crafting brand experiences.
What’s more, the sooner you start ensuring accessibility requirements are met, the less rework you will have to do. Take the example of designing a brand guide:
Designer A sits on the marketing team and is working on brand guidelines. They do not prioritize accessibility in their workflow, and outline guidelines for a color palette without any consideration of proper color contrast to ensure readability on brand collateral. Six months later, Designer B on the digital team is briefed to redesign the website. To ensure proper color contrast on the website, Designer B has to revisit the color palette values and ship a website that breaks brand guidelines.
In that example, we risk two things: the redundancy in time and money it will take to explore color for the website, and brand inconsistencies between the website and other branded collateral. Had accessibility been a priority up front, these issues could’ve been avoided.
All designers need specialized in a base knowledge of accessibility.
Is there an expectation for all designers to be specialized in accessibility? No, I find that unrealistic. But you should have a base understanding of how accessibility intersects with your specific role and deliverables, so you can ensure the work you’re designing sets your internal and external audiences up for success.
If your organization doesn’t prioritize accessibility, you can also champion for accessibility within your organization. If you don’t have a dedicated accessibility team in your organization, advocate for getting one with leadership.
For example, at Modern Tribe, our design team has a series of requirements we ensure we’re designing to, such as proper contrast, type scale, and ensuring we include proper states for interactive elements. But we also have a dedicated quality assurance team who specializes in accessibility. We can consult with them during the design phase, and once developed, they put our builds through rigorous testing.
Designers can still be specialized in their own field, while advocating for accessibility in the final product.
If you’re ready to start advocating for accessibility within your organization and wondering where to start, watch and share this PostStatus episode “The Right Approach to Accessibility” with leadership at your organization. In it, myself along with Chris Kindred, Director of Backend Development, and Mike Klanac, Director of Business Development, discuss why accessibility is imperative and how to integrate it within your organization.