Accessibility basics—and why it’s important

Jul 4

Creating accessible documents for everyone helps others and your business.

It's important to create documents with accessibility in mind to ensure that your content can be read and understood by as wide an audience as possible. An accessible document is a document created to be as easily readable by a low vision or non-sighted reader as a sighted reader.

Non-sided examples might include literally people that can't read it so they listen to it instead. I create lots of content in a variety of ways that allow more accessibility. For example, I can create a brochure and print format as a PDF. That's easy to read for anybody, can be translated into different languages, is interactive online and responsive, as well as creating an audio version that somebody can listen to.

There is a tremendous amount of information out there now, and literally hundreds if not thousands of methods to ensure accessibility with all visual media. but most people don't even know what this stuff means or why it's important.

Think of the millions of people that are reviewing your content on your website, on social media, on downloadable digital media like PDF documents… a.k.a. brochures, white papers, flyers, manuals, etc…

And think of the many people out there that may struggle to see your content clearly. Color blindness, farsightedness and many other vision issues — as well as things like dyslexia, foreign languages and other factors that affect how people read your content.

It may seem frustrating and complex, but what I try to teach is to just open your mind to this, understand that it is a growing concern for a lot of companies, and in my opinion, there are three outlying considerations: The first is trying to be considerate of people in general. There are lots of people that have certain abilities that may be more advantageous than others, for example there's nothing like a fresh set of 20-year-old eyeballs that can see things quite clearly as opposed to a 60+ year-old who has issues reading text like they used to… being considerate of that notion is a friendly, considerate, and kind thing to do when creating content.

The second consideration, I think is the practicality of it from a business standpoint. You want people to read your content. So making it easy for them to digest, absorb, and process is very important and in most cases is the distinguishing difference in business—that's the premise and basics of advertising and marketing… but nowadays we have the technology available and the ability to make our content even better. And not from a substance point of view, which obviously is important, but the experiential component—how people see your content.

The third consideration is very real and is happening all over the world. and that is the litigious factor. There are many many lawsuits from people suing companies because they feel that they're being left out or intentionally not being able to read certain content on websites, digital media and printed media. If you do some basic research, you'll find plenty of that evidence from very large companies. Especially like Microsoft., Apple, Google and others… which is why they have in many cases spearheaded a lot of the accessibility campaigns and hopes to try to improve this globally.

The bottom line is that accessibility with visual media and communications should be an important and meaningful consideration when creating.

There are numerous ways and lots of material out there that instruct you how to create accessible content and material, but in my opinion, it's just a good idea to consider right from the get-go and with very basic approaches.

For example, making sure there's enough contrast with your text that makes it easier to read. Using proper medium and bold faces with fonts to make it easier to read. be very mindful of thin fonts and things that may be more challenging to read all with accessibility in mind. Also consider color. not just the fact that there is a high number of color blind folks reading material but the practicality of being able to see things with poor color contrast. just keeping these things in mind when creating creative content can be respectful to all of the people reading your material, and equally important so that they can actually read the content you're trying to get across!

When I work with clients on branding and identity packages, I always include accessibility as close to being mandatory in my opinion. I want to make sure businesses are not safe from lawsuits, but also keeping up with modern technology, prerequisites for this industry, as well as predicting changes later on that will inevitably need to happen.

For example, sure we can create a fun, cool, slick looking piece of content with a branding guideline for example not incorporating anything to do with accessibility… but then later you find out there are customers that are having a hard time reading your content, there are other companies that are using accessibility thus making their content more readable and therefore generating more business than you… as well as falling behind in business. think of it like the old days there was a thing called the yellow pages.

Many businesses thought I only need to be in the yellow pages to succeed and ignored the call for a thing called the Internet, social media, and all the digital media stuff coming around the bend… most all of those businesses failed terribly because they didn't keep up with technology.

Even a more recent example would be Blockbuster Video. Around the year 2000, the then CEO of Blockbuster video had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million dollars… he was reported to have laughed at that and have no interest in streaming services whatsoever. The rest is history for them.

I'm not suggesting that accessibility is going to break your business, in fact, I'm not even saying you have to consider accessibility to be successful. Many businesses are just fine. And in fact, there are many cases where you just can't consider accessibility factors when creating content…

It's also very important to understand that there are actual laws, for example HIPPAA, BAA, and other requirements (especially in the medical field) that make accessibility mandatory. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European Union's new privacy law that harmonizes and modernizes data protection requirements. And there are more coming…

I'm merely suggesting to folks to be aware of this, and at least considerate when you're designing or creating any type of content or material for your product business or service. And that includes Word, Powerpoint, Indesign, PDF, email, social media, printed material, signage, websites, billboards— and just about everything else in the creative realm.

Here’s just a basic list of items to consider when it comes to accessibility. And this is just to illustrate how complex a topic it is and not easy to teach in just a few minutes…