Let’s all be honest with each other. Most of us (designers) and the general public will go about our day not once considering how a disability would affect us in our daily lives. Those days are coming to an end for anyone in the industry of design.
Specifically in the domain of web design is this never so evident. A number of companies and artists have been brought to court from Beyonce to Hobby Lobby to answer for their inaccessible websites. Dominos was taken all the way to the supreme court because screen reader users were incapable of creating a customizable pizza.
You may be asking yourself what law these companies could possibly be breaking? The answer is the American Disabilities Act (ADA). In short, the law states that your services need to be available to everyone. Now, the ADA didn’t become law until 1990 and the world wide web wasn’t open to the public until a year later. Needlessly to say there weren’t any specific accessibility guidelines written into the act for websites at this time, but that was the past. You can find today’s accessibility standards at the World Wide Web Consortium.
Websites have changed drastically over the past three decades with the advent of higher resolution screens, mobile devices, etc. creating a significant shift in how we approach design. Accessibility is the name of that next great shift in the landscape.
Much of what makes a site accessible is invisible to most of us but there are many visual characteristics that need to be noted going forward.
Color
Colorblindness affects nearly five percent of the population, most of that percentage being men. The degrees of severity range greatly but the most common is the difficulty to distinguish between reds and greens.
I once had a colleague approach me after a presentation touching on this and asked me ‘How often does this actually come into play in the world?’.
In 2015 the NY Jets played against the Buffalo Bills on Thursday night sporting new ‘Color Rush’ uniforms. The Jets all green and the Bills all red uniforms were flashy for some but indistinguishable for others. Here’s a video that shows how that game looked for colorblind folks.
Beyond color blindness, there are web standards for color contrast. Designers should aim for at least a 3:1 contrast ration for large text and graphic objects.
Often we don’t even have a say on the color palette at the start of a project. We’re restrained to the brand’s colors which we can only hope will lend itself useful to color contrast standards. Designers working on brands will now have to be cognizant of how these colors will be utilized in web applications. In turn, we should expect to see higher saturated colors in branding that will be reflected in the websites of the future.
This is the first blog post of a series on accessibility and its impact on design. I’ve only scratched the surface. Honestly, there is enough to write a thesis and its a bit of a struggle to refrain from a deeper dive. Of course, if you have any questions or comments please reach out to me and I’d be happy to consult.