100 points to know about...
Digital accessibility

Here you’ll find some design principles and tips you can follow as general guidelines for creating accessible websites for visually impaired users:

1. Uncluttered and simple design

Overburdening users with visual impairments with complex layouts can confuse them as to the contents of a page and hamper the efficiency of their assistive tools. Some practical tips you can apply are:

• Limit your choice of colours and pictures – there is beauty in simplicity! (Side note: this ties in well with the ecological dimension of the project)
• Make sure your multimedia does not overlap with different design elements and content
• Avoid pop-ups and advertisements
• Stick to simple fonts, such as standard Sans Serif fonts found on devices. Simplicity also means sticking to a default font size: 14 pt for body text and 18 pt for larger text. For more information on how to create accessible text, you can follow the readability tips found in Lesson 5: Notion 32.

2. Be smart about colour

Since people with visual impairments may experience low vision, distorted vision, colour blindness and other difficulties, the colours used to present your digital project matter. Some things to consider are:

• Design should have high colour contrast in order for different elements to be identified and distinguished. There are several tools on the web you can use to determine if the colour contrast you’ve used is sufficient. For a list of those tools and their functionalities, refer to Lesson 13: Notion 91 of this module.
• Do not pair text with patterned or complex backgrounds as it will not be legible
• Be aware of how your colour combinations come across to colourblind users. A common tip is to avoid pairing red with green and green with blue, but if you’d like to get more insight on accessible and inaccessible colour palettes, check out this link: https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/#%23D81B60-%231E88E5-%23FFC107-%23004D40
• Don’t rely on colour alone for users to understand prompts. For example, instead of notifying users that they should click the green button to complete a form, label the green button as “Submit” and have the prompt be: Click Submit when you’ve completed the form.

3. Make your content adaptable

It might seem difficult to create design that can fit the needs of all users, but a good practice would be to provide freedom of choice for them to adapt certain content to their needs. Some examples are:

• Include audio descriptions for text and videos as added support that users can turn on
• Allow users to adjust the font size and colour options of your layout to their liking