Being on brand doesn’t have to come at the cost of being accessible. You can have a distinct design while including people with different vision impairments. We explore brand accessibility, so your business can be stylish and accessible.

What does an accessible brand look like?

There are many elements that create the foundation of an accessible brand, such as:Woman reading on a tablet

  • colour contrast
  • large text sizes and clear fonts
  • sentence case.

Accessible branding allows you to expand your reach and include more than 575,000 Australians who are blind, vision impaired and colour-blind (Vision Australia, n.d.). An accessible brand lets your business adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

How can you create an accessible brand?

You don’t need to overhaul your entire look. Adjusting parts of your brand can make it accessible while keeping its original style.

Colour contrast is key

Colours are an integral part of branding – it helps your business stand out from competitors. Having a good colour contrast takes this idea one step further. A good contrast makes your brand colour palette more accessible. It shows respect, promotes better readability and lets users have a better experience.

If a user needs to add their details to a website or document, don’t rely on colour to convey your instructions. Use labels and colour contrast together. Labels allow colour-blind users to follow prompts without risk of missing required fields.

Font size and style matter

How you present the text for your content and brand is important. Having a clear, easy to read font is another integral element to an accessible brand. If you can, select a sans-serif font like Arial or Calibri. Not only does a sans-serif font make your brand approachable, timeless and clean, but it is also easy for people with dyslexia to read (Tailor Brands, n.d.). It’s helpful for your font to have different weights. This will make your brand consistent throughout all your content.

The size of your font is as important as its style. Having a large font size makes your content easier to read and skim through. This is more obvious when looking at content on a phone or smart device.

The case for sentence case

When writing copy for your business, it’s important to use sentence case. Sentence case is cleaner and improves readability (Quovantis, 2018). It doesn’t cause eye strain due to its legibility. A user’s reading speed is also faster when text has both lower- and upper-case letters (Quovantis, 2018).

Making your brand more accessible can include Australians who might’ve felt left out by other businesses. Talk to our accessibility experts to discover how you to make your brand more accessible.