From Colour to Capitalization – Three Brand Elements to Consider for Increased Accessibility

Can you tell what’s wrong with the visual on the left?

When great designers design a great brand, one of the key components is shelf life. If you want your brand to last over a decade, make sure your brand doesn’t lose out on the benefits (and avoid the regulatory pitfalls) of making sure you’ve built accessibility in.

When it comes to visual communications, there is nothing harder to fix than a broken identity. Typos on the Web can be corrected easily. Errors in a printed brochure, at worst, may mean having to reprint. However, if your brand design has ignored accessibility principles, you’ll have an ongoing burden to deal with.

• Colour contrast:

  Consider colour. International standards declare a minimum colour contrast ratio of foreground and background colours. If your design team hasn’t satisfied that ratio, not only is it going to be difficult to claim your online presence is accessible: everything from annual reports to outdoor signage is going to be challenging for the huge portion of your audience with visual impairments or colour deficits.

  Over 10% of men have some level of colour deficit. And we’re all colourblind when we’re looking at a photocopy or fax.

  So make sure that every variant in your brand book (including the variations where colours are reversed or expressed in greytones), as well as your standard slogan treatments, comply with the WCAG 2.0 Color Contrast 1.4.3 guideline  of a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 (3 to 1 for 18 point or larger, 14 point if bold). It could be even better business to strive for the Level AAA WCAG 2.0 Color Contrast 1.4.6.

  (Technically, the contrast rules only apply to machine text (so in many cases you’d not be strictly violating WCAG 2.0), and the spirit of these guidelines are to ensure that everyone can perceive your brand…it’s simply good marketing to make sure your brand presentation complies.)

  Oh, and if you’re marketing for an audience under a year old, you will want to know how human babies see colour: Tiny Eyes.

  Here’s my favorite tool for checking colour contrast, and it’s free and works on Windows and Mac: Colour Contrast Analyser.

  On a related note, differentiating product names based on colour could also be a mistake: for example designating levels of a service as “Red”, “Blue”, and “Gold” may be an ongoing burden in having to provide accessible equivalents (and avoid confusion and loss of intrigue for many audience members).

• Abbreviations:

  If you’re considering naming your organization or product with an acronym, or you anticipate that you’ll be referring to it as an acronym, think carefully how it will be pronounced by screen readers.

  Not long ago, screen readers were only a concern for that portion of your audience who can’t read (either due to a lack of eyesight or a lack of skill). However, in a world where everyone’s mobile devices are now offering the ability to read out loud, it’s important that machines that don’t know your name will pronounce it as you intend.

  If you’re IBM, then you’re well known enough to be in the exception dictionaries of Google Now and Siri and JAWS as “I.B.M.” rather than “ibbmmm”. However, chances are your company or product aren’t that famous. Which means that you’ll be at the mercy of a screen reader algorithm to decide how to pronounce your name. Think “St. Lawrence College” being wrongly announced as “Street Lawrence College” for example.

  Avoid both embarrassment and lost searches and sales. Research your proposed name and spelling of it carefully by having these prominent screen readers announce them to see if you’re pleased with the result including testing in every language that matters to you.

  If you have little choice but to go forward with a name that doesn’t announce well, mitigation is possible. For example, we can carefully code Web sites and PDF files to include alternate pronunciations for assistive technologies. However, of course it will be easier and more reliable to choose names that avoid this issue entirely.

• Capitalization and typefaces:

  If your clever naming candidate relies on capitalization to ensure that people read it right, you may also have a branding liability. Someone listening to your name (whether due to using a screen reader or a radio report) won’t have the nuance of uppercase and lowercase to know what your intention was. So, although cleverly creative capital letters within a word may add intrigue to your brand, don’t rely solely on the creative use of capitals or the nuance of a particular typeface for an essential part of your brand name. If the brand promise or core message is lost on those who aren’t looking at your name, it’s likely an opportunity cost not worth taking.