Drawing by FMinus

This post is part of a serie on ethical design inspired by this post by David Airey. See these posts as loud thinking and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts or correct me if you think that what I am writing makes no sense.

Accessibility is an issue in almost every aspect of design. Architecture is probably the most discussed area even though it is still hard to access buildings when in a wheelchair. However, I’ll just focus on graphic design and web design.

1. Graphic design
   When doing print design, you always have to make sure that the message you want to pass through is easily readable and understandable by your audience.
   Things you’ll have to handle carefully are:
   • Colors: be certain that the colors you are using are contrasted enough and that they can be seen by people with a visual handicap.
   • Font sizes: when text has to be read, always keep it big enough. An accessible font size may be hard to define, but will depend on your audience.
   • Symbols: accessibility isn’t always about technique but can sometimes be a solely cultural issue. Understanding of symbols can be a matter of age, culture or profession for example, and not knowing your audience can lead you to send misunderstood messages.
2. Web design
   Accessibility in web design is really hot right now and it’s a widely discussed issue. I will not go through the process of building designing accessible websites here, but just give you a few links that may be helpful if you are interested in that field:
   • The law: Section 508
   • The Web Standards Project
   • Web content accessibility guidelines
   • Accessibility Color Wheel
   • Designing with web standards
   • Bulletproof web design

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 11:41 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.