[Information Design] Accessibility
Designing websites with accessibility in mind is becoming a very common discussion - as it should be. Just from personal experience, I once made a poster for an event and asked five individuals for their thoughts - only to find out that all five were colorblind, and most of the poster was lost to them. While this is a startling coincidence, it is also an excellent example of how it is important to keep accessibility in mind creating content - such as using alt text or captions on images in a way that allows blind or visually impaired audiences to understand the information being conveyed.
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| A color blindness test plate which shows the number 8 in red surrounded by a circle of green. |
Or, in the case of videos, insuring that captions - quality captions - are available on your videos so that deaf and hearing impaired viewers can still enjoy the content you create. The video below, which is mainly silent, discusses this more in-depth.
Another way to help viewers understand a video is to include a transcript - that way, for silent videos such as the one above, the visually impaired have another way to access and understand the information being conveyed. Such as the transcript found in the description of the YouTube video above.
There are so many tools now available for accessibility - many mobile devices come with native text-to-speech software which will read out the text on a website or ebook. However, a responsible content creator should not take these tools as a given - people use many different devices and locations to access data, and a public library in a small town might not have the same level of native accessibility options as the latest iPhone.
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