Think of your favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant that has food to-die-for but branding that died in the 90s courtesy of Microsoft clip art. And with the trend being colorful and bright, they took it and ran with it. Making everything yellow, red, orange, and bright blue from chairs and table cloths to murals and menus.
Now, don’t get me wrong, lots of color and “fun” can do well for brands if handled properly, but with great power comes great responsibility! Unfortunately most of these mom-and-pop restaurants had to focus on what they know best, the amazing food and making money, so when they put together that colorful menu in front of you they were not aware of how difficult it could be for some people to read red text on an orange background, or read the small text describing the ingredients in the dish.
This difficulty to read a simple menu plays into how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has changed the world as a whole. The ADA was created to expand upon the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established protection against discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin, by also requiring organizations to provide “reasonable accommodations” to employees with disabilities. These same rules have become the basis of similar laws around the world in regards to how to accommodate every employee (in which anyone at any moment can be an employee, meaning this applies to all individuals).
ADA compliance allows anyone to have the same access as the next person to consume the content they are both accessing and gain that knowledge. In regards to design, that covers having contrasting colors, large enough fonts to read, navigation functionality for those with screen readers, video transcripts for the blind, video subtitles for the deaf, form labels for screen readers, tags within a PDF, and much much more.
As stated in this article, websites have and still are in the gray area on whether they are technically included under these laws, but with the growing number of court cases awarded to plaintiffs against business’s websites it is probably not worth gambling on a court ruling in the business’s favor.
Because we are knowledgeable in ADA compliance, we do try to be advocates for the rules as we work on projects, but these laws do apply beyond what our team works on. ADA compliance needs to be more front-of-mind in all of your work, especially all of our creative work.
This article can be used by your creative team when they are working on PDFs to make sure they are accessible to all users also.
The most important thing to keep in mind: We have the power, and this is all of our responsibility.