Design for edge cases

Many of the graphic design fundamentals, principles, and best practices have an appreciable impact on the accessibility of a design. For instance, if we were designing a business card, we would test it with the longest and shortest possible names and email addresses that the card may have to accommodate. This kind of consideration is second nature for professional graphic designers when designing to accommodate information. We need to take this exact type of thinking and extend it to designing to accommodate people.

If you design for extremes, you design for all.

It is impossible to consider the individual characteristics of every person on earth in a design. In order to design for accessibility, we should focus our efforts on the outliers at the extremes of human diversity. By considering their needs, we can serve a much larger audience as well as increasing the quality of the design for everyone.

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Sensory Considerations

At its core, graphic design is concerned with communication. It is critical that designers consider diverse sensory abilities and preferences of their audience. Consider these sensory characteristics in in your next design:

Eyesight

• Hypersensitivity to light;
• Colourblindness, ranging from those who cannot see colour at all, to those who cannot discern between certain hues;
• People who are partially sighted or low vision, but still rely on their eyesight to see images or read;
• People who are blind or low vision to the point that it is impossible for them to read images or text visually.

Hearing

• Hypersensitivity to sound;
• People who are hard of hearing, but still rely on it for communication;
• Deafness;
• Deafness and blindness.

Multi-Modality

Design that is limited to a single sensory modality will likely be inaccessible to many people. Successful accessible graphic design reaches across many sensory limitations, and communicates through multiple modalities. Semantically structured text is often utilized as the basis for modal translations, as it can be robustly interpreted by various assistive technologies.

Cognitive Considerations

Consider people with conditions that affect their ability to process, understand, and communicate information. There are a multitude of conditions that can affect cognitive function, and they can cause difficulty with any number of the following tasks.

• Distinguishing sounds from background noise;
• Focusing or staying on task;
• Memorizing and recalling information;
• Understanding and following directions;
• Understanding complex logic;
• Understanding abstract ideas;
• Understanding language usage;
• Communicating in speech or writing;
• Working with numbers;
• Keeping expected pace.

Consider the interaction between multiple conditions, and consider how these might also interact with the sensory limitations listed previously.

Cognitive Load

There is a finite amount of new information we can process, memorize, and recall at any given time. In order to maximize the accessibility of a design, we need to minimize the cognitive load it demands from the user. Use these design principles to ease the cognitive load:

Grouping

Group pieces of content in a manner that optimizes utility to the reader, and clarifies understanding.

Chunking

Avoid large, overwhelming blocks of information by breaking up content into smaller sections with meaningful groupings or headings.

Hierarchy

Clearly differentiate the relative importance of each piece of content in the design.

Anchors

Do not demand that a user reads the entire piece, or must read it all in one sitting. Use headings and other anchors to allow the reader to jump around, and easily find their place in the content.

Consistency

Consistency helps decrease distractions and increase predictability in a design, while breaking with this consistency will help draw attention to a novel element.

Grid

The visual structure afforded by a well-implemented underlying grid provides additional consistency and predictability for the reader. Avoid organizing content in any manner that requires the user to cross-reference, as this necessitates memorization and recall leading to increased cognitive load. Never require the user to cross reference a guide or table, and avoid using legends whenever possible.

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To understand the challenges people with disabilities face, look around and be observant. Since about 25% of society has one or more disabilities, you're bound to find them. Maybe you know someone in your own surroundings. Try to talk to them about their challenges and how you as a designer can help them. It can also help to consider certain scenarios other might fin themzelves in, like with empathy prompts.

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What do I do?

While these considerations are still very broad and may still be hard to imagine, don’t worry! We’ve got your back. We’ve distilled everything a designer should consider and know into bite-sized chunks and categorised them into easy and familiar chapters. They are filled with concrete tips and actual design-examples to help you understand. Click on the Learn dropdown in the menu or go to learn to see your dashboard.

Don't worry about knowing everything about accessible design right away! Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the whole picture, take it bite by bite. Read and learn one bite every day, and complete one exercise at a time. It's better to make one small improvement than to try to do everything and end up doing nothing. Even a small change towards accessibility can make a big difference!