Accessible design ensures your message is clear and concise, and that your content is as easily absorbed and navigable as possible. When you hire a graphic designer with accessible expertise, making your reports AODA compliant is a bonus to a strong, beautiful design.
The Basics (visual design)
Half of accessible design is about the choices we make in the design stage. Starting with your report template, we look at ideal typefaces for headings, for body copy, and a colour palette that will give your report both interest and high contrast.
Scannable design
Scannable designs allow for not only those with vision impairments to more easily view your report, but also readers who are neurodivergent or have other challenges (ie: ADD) with absorbing large amounts of copy.
Large, bright designs
A great way to test your report’s design (at the template stage please :D) is to simply view it on your phone. PDFs are not designed or optimal for mobile viewing but since a lot of users will inevitably do so, it’s a useful test to see how your scaling and contrast are looking.
Key elements:
- Typography styling + sizing
- Clear heading hierarchy
- Logical reading order
- Only bolded phrases of most importance
- Bulleted lists
- Large figures (with data labels added) and illustrations
- High contrast colours
Example of scaling in a report illustration
Theirs: why so tiny?
Ours: As large as possible!
The Next Level (technical encoding)
Here we get into the technical stuff. This work is critical for the operation of screen readers and assisted reading devices. We do this work once the design is complete and approved.
Key elements:
- Metadata and document titling
- Dynamic table of contents with hyperlinks to all TOC headings/sections
- Bookmarks
- Heading tags in nested order (for up to 50 paragraph styles!)
- Alt text
- Table tagging
- Hyperlinks (black with underlines)
Our report designs
Check out our reports to see how we applied the principles discussed in this blog and get in touch if we can help you elevate your report designs to the next level!