The Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) encourages discussion, educates and gets people thinking about digital accessibility. The ultimate aim is to create an improved standard of accessibility for people with disabilities or impairments.

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility refers to the capacity that individuals with disabilities or impairments can engage with and consume digital content. Adhering to a high standard of digital accessibility is integral to support inclusivity and equal access to information.

What are Twelve Creative doing about it?

Twelve Creative have expert knowledge in providing fully accessible designs. Below are some of our considerations regarding visual, auditory, motor and cognitive accessibility needs.

Visual Accessibility

Colour contrast

High contrasting colours ensure text and graphics are visible to individuals with visual impairments. When designing content for visually impaired users, we stick to a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 (as advised by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0).

Minimum type size

Small type sizes can greatly hinder legibility. To optimise legibility and readability for all people, we make sure to use sufficient type sizes.

Alternative text

Alternative text assists users with visual impairments to understand the important elements of images or other visual content. It consists of a brief description of a graphic and should state its intent. Screen readers will read the alternative text to describe the graphics to individuals who are not able to see or decipher it.

Reading order

Screen reader users require documents to have established reading orders. Reading orders ensure that screen readers can recognise the correct flow of content within a document and can read the content to users accordingly.

Export tags

Further assisting the functionality of screen readers, various elements within a design should be allocated tags. Export tags are codes that determine the structure of a document. Content including headings, paragraph text, tables, images/graphics (with alternative text) and decorative elements (that can be ignored by screen readers) should be tagged for screen readers to interpret accordingly.

Auditory Accessibility

Captions

When working with video, captions should be included for people with hearing impairments.

Motor Accessibility

Tab order

Establishing logical and easy to navigate tab orders ensure all interactive elements can be accessed through keyboard use.

Cognitive Accessibility

Clear and Consistent layouts

The use of strong grid structures and typographic hierarchies foster clear and consistent layouts. As a result, content can be easily navigated and consumed.

If you’d like more information on how we can help you meet accessibility requirements, contact us.


To find out more about GAAD, see accessibility.day.