As technology and innovation improve, document accessibility is more an expectation than an aspiration within the assistive technology community. Integration of accessibility checkers into the likes of Adobe and Microsoft Office suites hint at a growing level of both need and understanding when it comes to the design industry.
Understanding the audience
Lauren Heppell is a marketing and creative officer at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. A designer in her spare time, Lauren manages projects and supports content development that includes the accessible document process her peers use in their work. That process starts by thinking about who a product is intended for.
“A lot of the heavy lifting at the beginning is about ensuring that we know exactly who this is going to be for, and how they're going to be interacting with it, and engaging with it; what is the information that we're trying to communicate?”
Heppell says that an older audience is more likely to have different access needs than a student population that skews younger. In her line of work, the kinds of documents being produced for an academic audience have a radically different set of constraints than those made for a more general group. Then comes the next step of the process: what form the document is going to take.
“From there, we can determine things like type, size, the best method of delivery, etc. So, is it best delivered as a webpage? Is it best as something that we could put on social media, for example? Is it best as a PDF document? Is it best as a print piece? So, the audience is really the key thing.”
Accessibility in design
Part of Heppell’s understanding of accessible design and its implementation comes from her experience as a person with a disability. She has persistent postural perceptual dizziness, a condition that she says makes her feel like she is “constantly . . . on a boat”. Her disability is something that has shifted how she works and thinks about design.
“My brain has a hard time processing where I am in space and what my balance is doing, and that leaves little energy for executive function. So, things like thinking and trying to process information . . . have changed a lot in terms of time I can spend looking at a screen; a complex visual environment can be quite triggering for me.”
While many accessibility tools – like screen readers and contrast/color-changing plugins – are rooted in the digital environment, Heppell finds it easier to go back to pen and paper. The use of color is something that she says became more notable for her once she developed the disorder.
“That's something that I didn't really see. I could understand it, and I could grasp the concept of why it would be so important, but I really realized it when I developed this disorder. And, just looking at different colors, and if they weren't different enough, in contrast... it's really hard just to even process.”
Contrast is something that is also a focus of Dan Shier, a creative lead for Regina’s Harvard Media who has also done design work for local community organizations like Queen City Pride and the Regina Folk Festival, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He says that coming back to the basics of accessible design is something he and his team do regularly.
“Legibility, contrast, and clarity are very, very important when it comes to that kind of graphic design work that we do. You know, as the designer, we know what we're kind of looking at on our screens, but we might not consider how that might appear to our audience.”
Accessibility resources
One of the resources that Shier uses is an Instagram account called @access_guide_. He returns to their resources to inform his practice as a designer, even as his attention shifts between posters, documents, websites, signage, and whatever else happens to cross his desk in his various roles.
Heppell also uses social media to inform her work. She recommends sites like uxdesign.cc for their guide on image description, an impactful tool for those with visual disabilities; and brought forward resources like Chad Chelius’ courses and Dax Castro’s PDF Accessibility Facebook group as places to start for designers who want to implement accessibility further into their work.
Shier’s process when it comes to accessibility involves a lot of change. He says he plots down what comes to mind in his initial copy but finds space during the revision process to make sure what he is producing is matching the needs of his audience.
“And so just that simple process of rereading, coming back to the next day, and helping to like condense and reduce the amount of words that I end up using, I think is that intention to make my work more accessible to other people.”
Heppell says that, for the copy to be accessible, designers should be thinking about writing to a seventh-grade level. She uses tools like Hemmingway to make sure that the work her team is producing is easily digestible. It’s the work of that team that she says keeps the wheels of accessible design churning in her department.
“I don't think any of this would be possible without the hard work that the team, particularly the web team at the university as well as the graphic design team [have done]. Both of those teams have just done phenomenal work in terms of research, focus groups, [and] product management.”
Document accessibility must-haves
The types of accessibility design principles that should be considered in digital content vary, but as a best practice, designers should incorporate the following into their content at a minimum:
- Ensure non-text content such as images and logos have alternative text and/or text descriptions to provide context
- Use hi-color contrast to distinguish background from foreground content
- Include tagging structure that is accessible to assistive technology
- Properly label form fields to be accessible to keyboard-only users
- Ensure all links and interactive content are labeled and work properly when activated
- Format tables properly and designate table headers
- Ensure every document has a title and language
For more information regarding best practices in digital document accessibility, visit the World Wide Web Consortium's WAI PDF UA initiative page for technical resources.
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