Is your brand design truly accessible? How do you test to find out?

At Cúpla, we exist to build brands that make life better for people - and we are focused on ensuring the organisations we work with can support as many people as possible. For many of our clients - particularly those working with under-served audiences - this involves improving their accessibility, to make it easier for people to get what they need from the brand. 

Along the journey of helping our clients learn more about accessibility, we’re also working hard to expand our knowledge and constantly improve our work’s accessibility, readability and inclusivity. Here’s just three of the handy tools and learnings we currently use, and are looking to integrate into our design process in the future:

1/ Colour Contrast Checker

When it comes to readability and accessibility, colour contrast can play a major role. 

Across all our identity designs and brand guidelines, we use a free tool called colourcontrast.cc to check the accessibility of our brand colour combinations. The tool tests different font sizes and weights against different background colours. 

We then use this information to create detailed accessibility guides for our clients as part of their brand guidelines, outlining how brand fonts and colours can be paired to deliver the best accessibility for their audiences. This ensures that any team member or contractor that uses our brand guidelines is empowered to deliver communications that have been checked for colour accessibility as a baseline requirement.

You can see an example of our accessibility guidelines below, which we created for Women’s Health Victoria. You can view our full visual identity and tone of voice case study HERE.

2/ Google Fonts Knowledge

This fantastic tool hosts a range of highly-detailed explanations about the different factors that contribute to font readability and accessibility. 

It has evolved the way we think about type accessibility, moving from contrast alone, towards a deeper consideration of spacing, letter shape and more.

For example, when considering low vision or neurodiverse audiences, we have learned that it’s important to consider fonts where there are purposefully-designed differences between letters that look similar (e.g. d and b, c, o and e). These simple design choices can ensure communications are more accessible for more audiences. 

3/ Alt text for website imagery

Alt text (alternative text) is copy used to describe an image on a website. Not only is it vital for best-practice SEO (Google’s algorithm can’t read images), it also helps vision impaired audiences experience your content, by providing information for screen readers.

As we continue along our own journey of improving our accessible practices, we are moving to ensure our website features descriptive alt text, and to understand best practice alt text implementation to help guide our clients on improving their accessibility.

Let’s chat

We’re always on the lookout for new tools and tips for improving the accessibility of our creative work - so if you’ve got any, or if you need help improving your brand's accessibility, we'd love to hear from you. Let’s work together to improve our industry’s approach to accessibility.