How to create Accessible Designs?

Inclusivity is the key to modern design. About 15% of the global population is affected by some type of disability. This means over one hundred million people are affected. Designing for these people not only widens the impact you can create with your design, it also improves your brand among other users. One of the most important design principles that may help you boost your next web design is accessibility. Accessible designs simply refer to Design patterns that can be easily recognized and used by a wide range of users, from casual visitors to professionals. In this article, we will discuss what Accessible design is and how to create Accessible Designs.

How to create Accessible Designs?

What are Accessible Designs?

Designs that follow accessibility are called Accessible Designs. Accessible Designs are designs that a wide range of audiences can easily use, this basically means that these designs are simple and these designs make sure that the user does not require a lot of context to use the website or application. Accessibility is a design principle that talks about designing products and services in an all-inclusive manner. In simpler terms, it means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.

For example, you can create a new feature for listening to the news in your social media app and improve its accessibility by also providing the transcript in some commonly used languages so that the feature becomes accessible to people with hearing issues.

How to create Accessible Designs?

The Three Cs strategy is used by many designers for coming up with accessible designs, these three Cs cover all the necessary accessibility issues with solutions on how a designer can overcome them. Make sure to follow these three Cs of Accessible design while creating your designs:

1. Color contrast accessibility:

• Color contrast is the first C in the three Cs concept and Color contrast accessibility means making sure that the colors we use in our design are accessible even for the ones with visual disabilities. Other that this, make sure that your color palette communicates the most important information in a clearer manner.
• The idea behind this is that even if some users might not able to understand the entire message, we can at least communicate the most important message to them. Make sure to use Plugins like Stark to check the accessibility in your design after you create an accessible color contrast.

2. Clickable area accessibility:

Clickable area includes two components of design – Action buttons and Input fields. While designing these two components make sure that the clickable area should be easy to access even for the users with deficiencies. These can be achieved by making sure that you follow these four points:

• The user must be able to navigate the elements on the user interface using the tab key on the keyboard.
• Apply hover effects to all the clickable areas such as buttons and icons so that it is easy to track the mouse pointer specially for users with cognitive disabilities.
• Use the pressed effects so that users know exactly when they press the button.
• Provide labels and instructions so that users with disabilities find it easy to use the relevant use interfaces.

3. Common content accessibility:

For Common content accessibility, two main criteria are Typography and Layout. For better content accessibility, the first thing to do is optimizing Typography. Typography can be optimized of accessibility by making sure the text is properly aligned and line spaced. Layout must be responsive and easy to access on smaller screens. Follow these four points for achieving common content accessibility:

• Alignment should be left or right (don’t use justify alignment unless necessary)
• Line spacing should be at least 1.5x the font size.
• Paragraph spacing should be At least 1.5x the line spacing.
• The Paragraph width should go maximum to 80 characters

Importance of Accessible design

Importance of Accessible design can be understood under following points:

1. Improves Usability:

Accessible design ensures that the Design patterns we follow in our design can be easily recognized and used by a wide range of users, from casual visitors to professionals. This makes the application or website simpler to use hence improving the overall usability of the application or website.

2. Reduce Institutional Risk:

Taking the example of the US federal law for students, the law demands that students with disabilities must be guaranteed equally effective learning opportunities as students without disabilities. Following accessibility you are also making sure that your application serves everybody equally hence properly obeying the law.

3. Reduces Cognitive Load:

Since Accessible Design means designing for everybody, this usually translates into making the design simpler and making sure that user is not bombarded with a ton of information. This reduces the cognitive load in the mind of the user leading to better user experience.

4. Improves User centricity:

User centricity is all about keeping the user in the center of the design. Accessible designs are the most user centric design since it not only designs for common people but also keeps in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.

Conclusion

In this article we discussed what Accessible designs are and how to create accessible designs. Accessible Designs are designs that can easily be used by a wide range of audiences, this basically means that these designs are simple and these designs make sure that the user does not require a lot of context to use the website or application. We as designers should always aim to cater a larger audience meanwhile also making sure that our application or website is easy to use for these wide range of audience. To achieve this, accessibility plays an important role, it makes sure that the design is much more user-friendly, relatable, and user centered. Make sure to follow the points we discussed in this article in order to create professional and accessible designs.