Designing with Accessibility

Being primarily a print designer, accessibility is not something I was aware of until very recently. We created a brochure for the National Museum for Women in the Arts and something important to them was ensuring the digital PDFs we create are as accessible as possible. Initially, I thought this meant placing text in the metadata of the photos so screen readers had something to look for when describing images. As I’ve learned with the most recent brochure we designed, it is much more involved.

Reading in Order

One of the biggest takeaways from this brochure was learning that the objects on each page have to be read in order. Makes sense, right? What I didn’t know was that I had to arrange them in a specific order myself. InDesign has a feature that lets me select various objects on a page and decide the order an e-reader will scan them in. This is useful for making sure text is read before an image and helps bring order to an otherwise abstract design.

Contrast

Color contrast is another important aspect of accessibility. To ensure those with visual impairments are capable of clearly reading all of the text, contrast must be over a certain value. If colored text is placed on a colored background with very little contrast, it may become illegible for certain individuals. I would say that if accessibility is important to a document, do not place text on colored backgrounds. Stick with black text on a white background as much as possible.

Alt Text

While e-readers can scan through text just fine, images are another problem altogether. In order for e-readers to accurately describe images, a description must be written and attached to the image within InDesign. E-readers can scan this text and read it allowed, allowing those with visual impairments the ability to understand the graphics being accompanied with the text.

While there are other smaller details that can be managed, such as correct Paragraph Styling or giving your document a title, these are the major things to be made aware of. Adobe Acrobat has tools for accessibility, so if you’re unsure if something will be acceptable try running it through Acrobat and see what it reports.

When designing with accessibility in mind, its always good to start with this from the very beginning. Keep in mind these points while designing so you don’t have to go back and edit/correct all of your previous work.