Accessible by design

Accessible content, simple steps to make content better for everyone.

Asking to sort out accessibility after everything is already designed is like asking your guest about their dietary restrictions after you’ve prepared a meal and they are already sat by the table in your dining room.

It’s way too late and the amount of work needed to make it accessible (safe to eat in that example) will require more than if it would be considered from the start.

Better later than never but…

We wait with getting a better chair for our home office until our neck hurts, we wait with visiting a doctor before we feel too bad, we wait with eating until we’re starving . How many times action taken before things got worse would help us? How many times doing something in the right/healthy way would prevent us from troubles or upsetting someone?

It gets more serious if we’re talking about public services. Badly designed make people using it suffer in many ways for many years. Too many times temporary “fixes” lasted way longer than intended and it wasn’t due to the way how things got improved but lack of time and money to make things right.

How we can do better

There are many simple things which considered early in the process of designing/writing content may significantly improve accessibility of many publications, weather you’re writing in Word or directly in the CMS.

In many cases it boils down to a few points

• Learn to use tools you have at hand (use headings in CMS’s or heading styles in Word, it will not only help with accessibility but also improve content structure)
• Think about your audience (accessible content is not only a checkbox exercise it’s also about plain English and writing about what people need to know not only what you want to tell them)
• Do you really need all these decorations?
• Think about good selection of colours. Simple test? check if you can see/read your diagram or text outside trying to read on your phone in full sun (but best use tools dedicated to assessing contrast ratio)
• Answer yourself honestly: Do you prefer fancy or functional tools to do the job? Do you want people to enjoy the look or the functionality of your product?
• What’s more? Please share your top tips! I’ll add them here.

Summing up

Thinking about accessibility as early as possible allows everyone to design good content accessible by default. Few simple changes in the workflow may have significant influence on how accessible information we want to share is.