Accessibility guidelines for designers and communicators
As a university with a mission to serve students with disabilities since the early 1970s, UW-Whitewater is committed to fully inclusive experiences in learning, living and developing. Compliance with accessibility guidelines increases the quality of design and communication for everyone. This page contains focuses on best practices for accessible graphic design. See also our digital standards for accessibility.
Visual considerations
How will the content be received by the user? There are potential visual sensory barriers to cognition that should be considered by the designer:
- People who are sensitive to light
- People who are color blind, ranging from those who see only black, white and gray to those unable to discern between certain hues
- People with severely diminished vision
With Photoshop, users can proof images with Color Universal Design (CUD) to ensure that graphical information is conveyed accurately to people with various types of color vision impairment, including people with color blindness. Photoshop can be configured to always add an alt attribute to image elements. Photoshop also allows users to specify alternative text descriptions for image slices.
Organizing a layout to maximize accessibility
There is a limit to our information processing ability and working memory capacity at any given time. An accessible layout reduces the "cogintive load" demands from the user by simplifying and organizing the information cleanly. Consider these ways to ease the cognitive load:
- Grouping content optimizes utility and clarifies understanding.
- Chunking breaks up large, overwhelming blocks of information into smaller sections with meaningful grouping.
- Hierarchial structure helps to clearly differentiate the relative importance of each content piece within a page.
- Anchors allow readers to jump around and easily find their place in the layout.
- Consistency helps decrease distractions and increase predictability, while breaking with consistency helps draw attention to a specific element.
- Grids provide a visual structure and added consistency and predictability.
- Avoid using legends and cross-referencing whenever possible. Cross-referencing and legends require memorization and recall, which increases the cognitive load.
Below are three examples of organizing layouts to maximize accessibility using grouping, chunking, hierarchy, anchors and consistency.
