4. Creating Digital Accessibility Culture
Other Digital Accessibility Considerations
Most of the digital accessibility concerns within your company revolve around the Web, electronic documents, and multimedia. In your research, you discover there are a few other areas where digital accessibility should be considered. These include branding, coding practice, and communication.
Branding
When considering branding elements for an organization, there are a few accessibility considerations to keep in mind.
Use of colour: Using the WCAG guidelines for colour use, ensure sufficient contrast between text colours, and the background colour they may appear over. At a minimum, use standard 10- to 12-point fonts and provide a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 or greater.
Fonts: There are font characteristics that make fonts more or less legible, thus, more or less readable. “Fancy” fonts like Comic Sans for instance, can take longer to recognize, and this affects reading speed. This effect can be magnified for those with a print impairment.
Images with Text: While sometimes it is unavoidable, images of text should be used sparingly or avoided altogether. Text in images tends to degrade when magnified by those with low vision, making it difficult to read. For those who are blind and using a screen reader, text in images cannot be read at all. The text of a logo is an exception, but, if you also include a company motto as part of the logo, for instance, consider adding it as actual text next to the logo, rather than making it part of the logo image itself.
Coding
You might be surprised to know that there are quite a few blind or low-vision computer programmers. The way they code is much like any other coder does. Though code itself is not typically accessible or inaccessible. Good coding practices, such as effective use of space and effective commenting, can make code more usable for both sighted and blind coders.
Communication
Many of the guidelines for creating accessible web content and documents also apply to communication. Where paper documents are distributed, be sure an electronic version is also available, making sure headings are properly used to structure topics, and describe in text form any visual elements in the communication.
Email can also be a major form of communication, both for promotional purposes and for personal communications. Emails can be created as plain text, rich text, or HTML. While plain text will generally be accessible, it can lack structural elements, which may be important for longer emails. Rich text and HTML can be marked up with headings, lists, alt text for images, and so on, to make them more accessible. Although there may be readers who display emails as plain text, in which case these formatted emails can be difficult to understand. For a typical personal email communication, plain text is usually fine. Where formatted text is used, it is advisable to also provide a plain text version as a fallback.
For more about accessible email