I've been doing a lot of research for work lately in the area of accessibility on the web. As designers we tend to like to make things look as pretty as possible - sometimes at the cost of how easy something is to understand. It's easy to forget that not everyone is as capable as you, and for your site to be able to reach an audience without discriminating you have to take into account that people looking at your site may have vision impairments, motor impairments, colour blindness, learning disabilities...
So, was just wondering if other people here take into account these things, and if so you do you deal with them? Do you think we should be taking relevant precautions with print design as well?
At work at the moment we've decided that the limitations from making a site accessible are too restrictive, so have compromised by using a style switcher for people with bad vision, similar to the one BBC has in their web accessibility study.
Further reading:
Accessibility Colour Wheel - shows how the 3 most common forms of colour blindness affect vision
BBC Accessibility Checklist
Why developers hate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
The Gaian Graphic Designers Guild
Gaia's official Graphic Design Guild for all things profiles, logos, graphics and much much more!
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
||||
|
![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() |