Why accessibility belongs in your brand guidelines
Accessibility guidance isn’t often incorporated into brand guidelines - yet it is something that many brands want to maintain as a standard within their marketing and communications. To us, this feels like a missed opportunity. Brand guidelines are a great place to help you maintain accessible design standards without adding unnecessary legwork!
Pushing accessibility guidance into their own set of guidelines can make it a lot harder to maintain the standards you are aiming for when it comes to accessibility.
It will never be just designers who will be using your brand guidelines.
Many people will be using your brand assets to create external and internal communications. Not everyone will have experience with accessible design. So setting out clear guidance will help them create on-brand and accessible content with ease.
It’s not just about those designing your marketing and communications, it is also about those who are reviewing. Help them to keep on top of what standards need to be met by keeping this guidance within easy reach.
Accessible design should be framed as ‘good design’, not something above and beyond.
Accessibility doesn’t need to form a set of additional pages within your guidelines. You can build them seamlessly with any advice on your colour palette and typographic styles that you already have.
Guidelines are a great place to collate formalised guidance based on your brand’s unique typeface and suite of assets.
Building out specific guidance on accessible design for your brand takes work, and once done, you want to make sure that it isn’t lost. So, giving it a place in your brand guidelines is a great way to solidify this advice.
It sets the tone that accessibility is a core part of your brand. Not a trend or a fad you are picking up.
This can be great, especially when onboarding new team members. It means that accessibility will be on their mind from the very start.
Accessibility needs to be easy for it to become ingrained in your brand’s day-to-day.
Making sure that people don’t need to remember all the accessibility guidance by heart is key to making this process easy for them. Embedding it within your brand guidelines is part of that.
Creating accessible visual examples of your brand in action is a great way, at the start of any rebrand or brand refresh, to ‘stress test’ your accessible design guidance.
It will showcase how your brand will come together in a creative, but still accessible way. Those among us who like to browse the visual examples first to get an overall feeling of the brand will get an accessible preview of the brand in action.
Accessible design isn’t just about your external audiences.
By incorporating accessible principles into the very design of your brand guidelines, you are making sure that those brand guidelines will be able to be used and understood by as many people as possible.
Why not take this a step further? Are there more accessible ways to collate brand identity guidance than a traditional PDF format?
We’re sure there are more reasons, but these are our top ones.
Are you looking to update your brand guidelines with accessibility guidance or looking to run a brand accessibility audit on your brand identity? Get in touch with Michelle, and she will be happy to share more information on how you can do this.