Accessibility in Visual Design - Visual Layout

When designing with accessibility in mind, you have to take into account, that not every person who is capable of seeing the content perceives and understands it in the same way as others.

You have to make sure to create content in a way which includes everyone to use it.

There are people with low vision who are using screen magnifiers to zoom into the content, people who are color blind and cannot defer the colors you had in mind to make content perceivable in the beginning, and also people with cognitive, and reading disabilities.

In this article, I want to point out what to keep in mind when designing visual content.

• Design a good and clean layout that reduces distractions and clarifies the meaning of the content, because this can have a huge impact on the user’s understandability.
• Blocks elements, such as paragraphs, images, columns, should be visually separated from each other to be easier for the user to read and understand. This can be achieved e.g. by margins, padding.
• The layout should have only one main visual focus and draw attention to the intended visual focus. This could be achieved by using color and contrast.

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In the upcoming post we will discuss color and contrast, typography, as well as reading and focus order among other things.