Digital Accessibility
Thursday, May 18, 2023
What is accessible design, why is it important, and how can you improve accessibility?
HC
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So, what is Accessibility on Web?
Accessibility in User Experience (UX) design is ensuring users of all capacities can access your products and services.
Accessible design is beneficial to all users including:
👉People living with disabilities every day.
👉People experiencing temporary disabilities, this could include anything from a broken to losing your glasses.
15% of the world's population has a disability in one form or another, that’s 1 billion people and a huge audience to consider when marketing your brand or product.
Accessibility helps to address the needs of users in various scenarios, providing solutions like voice recognition, text-to-speech and keyboard compatibility. Other situational limitations include glare on a screen from the sun that has affected how we see lighter colours and certain colour contrasts.
How do we consider accessibility?
Here at Clicky accessibility is ingrained into our processes in all areas of design and development, some examples of this include:
👉 Using colour contrast checkers in all of our designs and development work.
👉 We consider the layout and font sizes to ensure that they are accessible to the audiences of our websites.
👉 We also follow WCAG guidelines.
Colour Contrasts
We ensure that colour contrasts on text follow WCAG AA standards by having a contrast ratio of 4.5:1. One important reason we follow a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 is so users from across the visual spectrum can view the content we design.
Font Sizes
Another example is our font sizes are not less than 16px, this is for ease of use and to avoid a user needing to strain their eyes.
Images
Lastly, we do not rely on images or colours to represent or convey information, just one of the reasons we do this is for screen readers as they do not read visual or colour information.
Plugins and Tools
We use a variety of tools to help ensure that our websites are more accessible.
Examples include:
ReachDeck
Accessibe
WhoCanSee
If you want to find out more about how you can make your website more accessible, our team of experts are always happy to chat.
