When Accessibility Precedes Design

When it comes to finding a balance between “good” design and accessibility, you will usually have to allow for a bit of give-and-take.  Good design is important; it can, in some cases, actually determine the accessibility of a text.  But it’s also important to remember that what may be accessible for one person might not be accessible for another person.  Different audiences require different design elements for the texts they are reading to be accessible—and your audience should always be your first priority.

The first step when creating any kind of document for the public is to determine who your audience is.  Who are you trying to reach?  If the members of your audience are neither visually nor audibly impaired, you can likely safely abide by the design rules that Roger Parker lays out in Chapter 14 of Looking Good in Print for print documents, with a few changes to digital texts.  Parker says that “your design must ‘bend’ to connect [three or more predefined points], and that’s backward” (279).  He believes, instead, that your design should be your first priority, and your textual elements should instead rise to meet a predetermined design.  I have to disagree with this point—to an extent.  As I said before, good design is important for making texts accessible, but you need to have the contents of your document (text, images, etc.) ready to go before you can incorporate them into a design plan.  These can all be revised if it turns out that they do not have elements consistent with the design plan that has been set forth, but knowing what you want to include in your document should come before the design itself.

In Chapter 14 of Looking Good in Print, Parker discusses the importance of design in documents such as flyers and business cards.  He makes some excellent points regarding the designs which work better for print documents.  The flyer example on pages 272 and 273, for instance, rightfully emphasizes the importance of including only the information absolutely necessary on a flyer, as well as making sure that no single image overpowers another on the page unless there is a significant reason for it.  As he says on the redesign page, “Deleting all but the most relevant text—what, where, when—increases the flyer’s readability” (273).  This rule-of-thumb is transferrable to digital texts as well.  Digital texts, however, in some ways provide room for more design elements, such as color.  Color doesn’t always transfer well into print texts, so you have to be careful about the colors you include in print documents, should you decide to do so.  Not all printers print color the same way; so, a color you might intend via your designing software might appear differently (different tones, shades, etc.), depending on the abilities of your printer.  In digital texts, though, color is likely to appear much more vibrantly on a screen than it would on a piece of paper.  Your document will appear just as it has been intended to.  Deciding whether you want your flyer to exist in print or digitally will be a determining factor in if you use color and how much.

Texts that need to be made more accessible for any purpose (auditory impairment, visual impairment, etc.) need to put their focus into both the content and design of the document.  For someone who needs a text to be made accessible to them in a specific way, usual modes of design may no longer be applicable.  Take sarcasm, for example.  A deaf person will rely entirely on what they can see on the page when reading a document.  Sarcasm may not transfer over as well in their own understanding of the text.  For the text to say something sarcastically and then turn around and say the complete opposite, or to use a picture that doesn’t align with what has just been said could be very confusing to someone who has to base all of the knowledge they are gathering on exactly what they can see on the page.  Without a proper transcription of exactly what is on the page, exactly where the sarcasm is being placed, texts will not be fully accessible to someone who is deaf.  The same goes for someone who is blind.  If someone is trying to access a document online and is using a screen reader to do so, the screen reader probably won’t be able to pick up any sarcasm that is included in the text.  Even colorblindness can pose a problem when it comes to accessibility.  Color can often be used to convey meaning.  For instance, red and yellow are said to be colors that we associate with hunger.  If a colorblind person is unable to detect red, however, a flyer designed to convince people to come to a new restaurant—with red and yellow coloring placed throughout the document in order to convey hunger—would go unnoticed by the colorblind person, and therefore be completely ineffective.

As I said earlier, when it comes to making documents both accessible and attractive there will usually have to be a bit of give-and-take.  It is entirely possible to find a balance between these two factors, but if your primary focus is on accessibility, you may need to give a lot more than you take.  In other words, accessibility and design can very easily clash, and depending on your goal, accessibility can very easily take precedence over design.  In most cases, I would say that your audience should always be your first thought when forming a new text.  Then you should focus on what you are trying to convey to your audience, and finally try to convey that through your design.  Taking these steps in making texts, either in print or online, is one of a few different ways for you to find the balance between accessibility and design.