Inclusive Design for your Business

There are always new buzzwords coming from our designer friends and marketing gurus, but this one has real substance behind it. New collateral, a new website, even our premises if customers visit, should all be considered for Inclusive Design. When you look at this image from Microsoft, you can see why!

Inclusive Design is essentially designing for accessibility, something we should all be thinking about. At its most basic, it enlarges the potential appeal of our businesses, but there’s a human element too!

If you build inclusive thinking into your design processes, it’s far simpler to incorporate into the process, and any incremental cost is negligible. The user experience is improved all round.

So, what sort of thing should you be considering?

As you can imagine, Inclusive Design is a HUGE area, but we’ve got a few, entry level suggestions, mainly around websites and printed materials.

1. Make all of your text a bit bigger. As we get older, it becomes more difficult to read small text, so we tend not to!
2. Make sure that any videos you use have transcripts, captions, as well as the audio.
3. Consider stronger colour contrasts in your design for people who are colour blind.
4. Don’t rely on colour to convey information. Not everyone can see the colours, and if they’re using a screen reader, they’ll need text descriptions or your message will be lost.

Your goal is to make sure your designer is considering the widest possible audience from the beginning of the design process. Avoid designing something and then wondering about making it accessible for people with particular needs.

And don’t worry about covering all of the options in one go! When you research accessibility, there are some basics, but the advice is to choose one aspect you’re going to change first, and come back to the others later. Every small change will make a difference to someone.

The important point about Inclusive Design is to remember that we are all likely to have enhanced needs at some point…