Accessibility 101: Designing for the neurodiverse world.

Lately, I’ve been keen on making my mindset more flexible and open to adopting new perceptual conceptions, and on constantly reminding myself that no matter how much I know, it’s still not enough. I’m not gonna deny it, but my will to learn in the past few months was quite degrading because I almost got burnt out since the beginning of 2022. That’s why I have taken down a route of “absolutely nothing” until the end of this year.

However, this doesn’t mean that I’m not open to new knowledge, absolutely not. In fact, whenever any headline or article, or post catches my eye, I make sure to read it thoroughly and take away the most of it. And not just that, I recently started getting back on track with learning and educating myself about the theoretical side and the science behind User Experience Design, which was why I started and completed the course “Practical Accessibility for Designers” by Chimmy Kalu on LinkedIn.

Prior to that, I already had adequate knowledge of Accessibility in design. But frankly, the course content really landed me in the vast world of Accessibility and what it means, and how to maintain good accessibility in whatever design I work on. So here’s a huge shout-out to the course and the instructor, Chimmy!

During and after watching the material, I really got inspired to advocate accessibility in design and its critical significance. So hear me out with my major takeaways and notes.

First, what is accessibility?

Accessibility is as simple as making your design accessible to as many user segments as possible. And by segments, I don’t mean social segments only, but all kinds of segments according to which people get classified, either social, educational, physical, sexual, or even age ranges. That is to say, anyone regardless of their physical capabilities, social class, educational background, gender, or age can use your design with absolute comfort and flexibility.

When designing, you need to consider how people with neurological diversities perceive your design.

Second, how can you achieve good accessibility?

There are many aspects that build up good accessibility for your design. starting from color selection, typography, navigation, and even the selection of images and visuals. But to keep you focused on one thing at a time, I’ll mainly focus on typography in this blog, and will save the others for more articles to come.

So, typography it is. Text is one of the most crucial pillars of any good design because if you really take a good look, a design is basically made up of visual assets and text. So we could possibly say that text makes up half of your design. If you fail with the typography, half of your design becomes a huge failure too! So what should we consider while deciding on the typography of any given design?

• Font Family:

Imagine checking the CNBC website, and you find a headline about a terrible accident using a fairy font. I am confident you will pause for a second to figure out how you’re supposed to feel, right?

Look how impactful the font family is on how you perceive the message. If a font is irrelevant to the emotional context of the message, it will confuse the user and, in most cases, will feel very creepy and awkward.

That is exactly why you need to make sure the font family you select fits your design. You can’t be designing a mobile app for a governmental institution for example and use Comic Sans! That would entirely defy the whole idea of the app. Instead, you should go for a more geometric and formal font, preferably a san serif too since those have better readability.

• Font size & formatting:

This is a huge pain point for users, font should be at least 14px, except for some very secondary information that requires the least emphasis, these can be 12px. Also, try to make the best use of text formatting to highlight whatever information you want. Stick with the font-weight adjustment instead of using italics and uppercase letters for cleaner and more visible formatting.

• Contrast:

Make sure to allow for enough contrast between text and background colors for better readability. For example, you can not use grey text on a white background, or dark grey text on a dark background. And it’s not just about using similar shades of text and background, it extends also to using colors that contrast with each other.

You can see how difficult it is to read blue text on a red background. Both colors are very bright and hurt the eye just by looking at them layered on top of each other. However, it is much easier to read white text on a red background because there is sufficient contrast.

To conclude, as a designer, you have to design with accessibility because this is basically how you design a product that people can use with ease and comfort. Accessibility extends to almost everything you use or design while building a product, One of those things is Typography and how legible it should be. Legible text is readable, clear, and convenient text in terms of size, formatting, family, and color.

Thank you for allowing the time to read this, and stay tuned for a new blog on another pillar of accessibility.