Accessible Design: Centering Human Experiences to Boost your Brand's Growth

Making a bank transfer in seconds, ordering a meal without leaving home, or simply staying in contact in real-time with someone regardless of distance–today, there are a lot of activities in the digital world that are supposed to make our lives easier. However, not all users can enjoy these solutions without accessible design. 

There is a wide range of users whose digital experiences are affected due to different visual abilities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over 2 billion people worldwide with different visual abilities. Additionally, sometimes users’ visual abilities are affected by temporary situations, from something as small as trying to look at their phone with foggy glasses or fighting a painful migraine. It’s important to for designers to remember that not all users have “normal” vision at all times, so digital experiences need to be accessible on multiple levels to be functional.  

Today’s marketers need to follow initiatives that democratize information. One of them is Accessible Design. Its primary goal is to be useful to all users, regardless of their abilities. The practice is guided by four fundamental principles that specify the characteristics that any digital product or service must meet to be considered accessible: 

1. Perceivable: the user can access content via multiple senses, such as seeing and hearing. 

1. Operable: users can successfully navigate the digital product or service through keyboard, mouse, or voice commands. 

1. Understandable: the information is readable and uses comprehensive, clear language that fits the expected voice and tone. 

1. Robust: ensuring the digital product or service can be compatible with whatever the user chooses to operate with, from different browsers to assistive technologies, like a screen reader or a magnifier. 

REMEMBER, CONSUMERS PERCEIVE DIFFERENTLY 

Next, we will explore best practices and specific benefits associated with developing products and digital experiences that are accessible to everyone, regardless of their vision or situation. 

Throughout the following examples, we will focus on consumers who experience web interfaces uniquely, such as those with low vision, color blindness, and other visual conditions. Our goal is to illustrate how implementing ethical and legal accessibility standards not only improves the experience for these users but also expands the reach of your brand. 

Standard Vision:Protanopia (lack of red color): Achromatopsia (lack of colors): Deuteranopia (lack of green color): Tritanopia (lack of blue color): Blurred Vision: Double Vision: These images allow designers to easily understand how vision can be impacted and, consequently, reconsider how digital experiences are being perceived.

Accessible designs become even more important when nearly 61.3% of users with varying visual abilities limit their internet usage due to unsatisfactory experiences, which negatively impacts digital trust and could lead to customer loss.

There are some essential guidelines to ensure a digital product's accessibility from a graphic design and usability perspective, which plenty of designers already intuitively apply in their work. But it’s important to be aware of how these guidelines help us create impactful projects and make our work more inclusive:

ACCESSIBLE DESIGN GUIDELINES

DON’T JUST RELY ON COLOR

• Avoid relying only color to convey information. It’s good practice to maintain good contrast and use tools that use different color variations. This helps with situations like colorblindness or even something like a cracked computer screen.

• Using these elements highlights useful information for users, as it can help people with different color perceptions identify sections or important messages. These elements should adhere to best practices so they can transmit information correctly. In the case of emojis, avoid substituting words since the user may not understand. Instead, use emojis as a way of ✨enhancing your message ✨ but not replacing it entirely.

• Clearly defining different text styles, such as titles, subtitles, and paragraphs, helps users easily identify content. It's also important to adhere to readability best practices, like using appropriate text sizes (i.e. a minimum of 16pt for paragraphs).

• Using alternative text in images is best practice because it helps users more easily identify image content. Additionally, it even helps with SEO!

HOW TO USE CONTRASTS

In this case, we’re referring to not only color contrasts but also color backgrounds that may cause text friction reducing legibility.

Check out these examples that show best practices for different visual abilities:

Standard Vision:

Protanopia (lack of red color): 

Achromatopsia (lack of colors): 

Deuteranopia (lack of green color): 

Tritanopia (lack of blue color): 

Blurred vision: 

Double Vision: 

BRAND BENEFITS

By practicing a more accessible style of design, marketers can achieve pretty big benefits that can lead to increased sales while strengthening brand loyalty: 

INCREASE OF THE REACH OF YOUR BRAND:

Improving website usability increases the audience reach while also implementing the W3C guidelines alongside these graphic design best practices enhancing SEO rankings. 

CONVERSIONS:

A more accessible user journey means people will be on sites more often and longer, significantly boosting conversion possibilities. 

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:

Ultimately, making our work more accessible to everyone is what we want to do. Digital experiences must incorporate as many users as possible, regardless of their temporary or permanent visual abilities.

BRAND LOYALTY:

Meeting standards and guidelines that extend and enhance users' journeys directly translates to satisfied customers because it helps them remember and maintain loyalty to their favorite brands.

At iCrossing, we are aware that designing with inclusive perspectives will allow us to evolve towards a future centered on human experiences. Simply put: we’re committed to creating better digital solutions for everyone.