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Editorial design
Development of accessible documents for true inclusion
After hours of searching you finally find that article that has the information you need for your project. But when you open it, the excitement is truncated, when there are only confusing texts, cluttered elements and meaningless colored boxes.
This is the daily reality for many people, because many documents are designed without following the basic principles of accessible design.
Creating accessible publications is creating content that anyone can perceive, understand and use.
And when we say “anyone” who do we mean?
- To people with a permanent visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disability, either because they were born with it or acquired it in an accident or due to an illness.
- Those who have a temporary limitation due to an accident or illness.
- People who have reading difficulties or few digital skills.
- People who face barriers due to language, hardware or software, internet access or even environmental conditions while accessing content.
What characteristics must publications have to be accessible to be accessible?
To make digital documents (PDF or EPUB type) accessible, it is necessary to take care of a series of practices at the time of layout and design of the publication.
We share with you some practices to achieve greater accessibility when designing publications:
Writing:
It should be clear, concise and respectful of grammatical rules. In addition, text hierarchies (headings, subheadings, quotations, etc.) should be well defined and consistent throughout the document.
Color and shapes:
Care should be taken to ensure that images and text blocks have a correct contrast and a use of colors that contemplates some vision alterations such as color blindness. In addition, although color is a resource that can help to classify or identify, it is advisable to complement it with shapes and texts.
There are sites that provide online tools to verify that we are using colors properly, for example COLORLITE ( https://www.color-blind-test.com/).
Design:
It is important to make decisions that prioritize an aesthetic design, but also effective and efficient, that allows to communicate adequately. For this purpose, easily legible typographies, simple iconography, representative images and a visually coherent organization of the elements should be chosen. In addition, it is best to avoid blurring or distortion effects or very small texts.
Metadata and tags:
Complementarily, to achieve greater accessibility, detailed descriptions of graphs or tables should be made, alternative texts should be used to describe images, and indexes of contents should be included.
And why should I make my publications accessible?
An accessible publication allows the available technological tools to fulfill their task of supporting users who require reading support. This ensures greater dissemination of content and a more satisfying user experience.
Moreover, like many other functions originally designed for people with disabilities, they end up benefiting the entire population. Since they increase the visualization in search engines, make it possible to locate specific content within documents, and facilitate the translation or interpretation of texts by algorithms. As a result, the reach to more audiences is extended, and the possibilities increase, not only for those who need them, but for all users.
And as good news, the planned design of accessible publications does not imply significant additional expenses, bringing instead great benefits to all people, and being a fundamental step in the mission that people, companies and organizations must share, to leave no one behind.
At El Domo Comunicación we specialize in designing creative and accessible communication products, ensuring that messages reach everyone effectively. If you have a communication product in mind where you need to improve the accessibility of your content: Let’s talk!
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