Rat Race Armaggeddon: Inclusive Design: Making Your Brand Accessible to the Largest Possible Audience

Inclusive design is an approach to design that seeks to create products and experiences that are accessible to the widest possible diversity. It’s about designing for everyone, so that the largest possible audience can engage with your brand.

Inclusive Design Solutions

When adopting inclusive design, it can be helpful to reject the idea of creating personas. Because there isn’t just one type of user, developing a design based on a spectrum of possible scenarios will allow for more empathy and inclusivity. That spectrum can also include people who possess permanent, temporary, and situational impairments with their hearing, vision, and other senses and abilities.

Here are several possible inclusive design solutions that brands can use to make their brand more accessible to those with different types of impairments or difficulties.

Vision Difficulties

The situations that might affect a person’s ability to see include:

Permanent difficulties: More than 3.4 million (3%) Americans aged 40 years and older are either legally blind or are visually impaired, according to the CDC. And percentage jumps multifold among people over 65. And 8% of men worldwide are colorblind, with red-green color blindness being by far the most common kind.
Temporary difficulties: People who have cataracts or are recovering from eye surgery would have difficulties seeing, particularly detailed pictures and small text.
Situational difficulties: In today’s mobile world where people can browse the web and read emails anywhere and everywhere, being in bright sunlight or simply being distracted in public can impair our ability to take in information visually.

Inclusive design tactics that can help include:

Making your web, email, and other content screen-reader–friendly and voice-assistant–friendly. For emails, that includes using Semantic Markup, descriptive text links (no “click here” links), font sizes that are 16pt or larger, and HTML text rather than graphical text as much as feasible.
Choosing colorblind-friendly color choices, which often boils down to not using colors side by side that are the same value.
Relatedly, use high-contrast text. Dark text on white backgrounds are extremely popular in designs for a reason. They’re easy to read whether you’re indoors or outdoors.
Following w3.org Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines.

Hearing Difficulties

The situations that might affect a person’s ability to hear include:

Permanent difficulties: About 15% of Americans over 18 have trouble hearing, according to the NIDCD, with males over 65 being the most likely to have hearing loss.
Temporary difficulties: Ear infections, ruptured eardrums, and other illnesses and accidents can cause temporary hearing loss.
Situational difficulties: Since brand content is being consumed everywhere, loud environments can create challenges for your audience. Think concerts, sporting events, sports bars, parties, city streets, subways, etc.

Inclusive design tactics that can help include using subtitles and captions for videos.

Hand Difficulties

The situations that might affect a person’s ability to interact via touch include:

Permanent difficulties: Roughly two million Americans have lost a limb, according to Amputee Coalition. Less than half of those are arm losses. Beyond amputees, another 54 million Americans have arthritis, according to the Arthritis Foundation. It’s also probably fair to think of people with very large hands as having a permanent difficulty, especially when it comes to navigating the web, apps, and email on mobile devices.
Temporary difficulties: Six million Americans break a bone each year, according to OSU, with wrist fractures being the most common injury. A hand or arm injury can make it difficult to interact with touchscreens, especially if your dominant hand is injured.
Situational difficulties: Day to day, there are many situations in which one of your hands might be full and unusable and can create problems with everyday tasks, such as carrying shopping bags and holding things.

Inclusive design tactics that can help include:

Making calls-to-action buttons at least 44 by 44 pixels. When appropriate, we recommend using full-width buttons on mobile content so that people can easily click them with either hand.
Not clustering links too closely together in apps, on websites, or in emails. This reduces the chances of someone accidently clicking an adjacent link and becoming frustrated. Navigation bars and footers are the areas where this is most likely to be a problem.
Supporting voice-controls and being voice-assistant–friendly.

Speech Difficulties

The situations that might affect a person’s ability to speak include:

Permanent difficulties: Millions of Americans are non-verbal, stutter, or have other speech difficulties, according to the NIDCD. And that doesn’t include people who have a heavy accent that might make it difficult for voice recognition software to understand what they’re saying.
Temporary difficulties: Laryngitis, throat surgery, and other things can a person to not be able to speak for a period of time. Approximately 9.4 million (4.0%) adults report having a problem using their voice that lasted one week or longer during the last 12 months, according to the NIDCD.
Situational difficulties: Loud environments such as clubs, sports bars, and subways can make it nearly impossible for a person to be heard and understood by speech recognition software.

Inclusive design tactics that can help include not relying solely on voice navigation for phone tree navigation.

Including user testing throughout your design process and including a diverse range of people and ability levels can give you invaluable feedback on prototypes so you can create the most successful design possible.

Reasons to Embrace Inclusive Design

We see three main reasons for brands to make inclusive design the status quo within their businesses:

1. Maximizing Audience

If you put all of the groups discussed above together, you’re looking at a significant and ever-changing group of consumers. Every brand knows that a larger addressable audience is one of the keys to success. However, they haven’t traditionally given much thought to that portion of people whose attention they’ve captured, but then who simply can’t participate in the experience they’re promoting due to difficulties.

Creating a better experience—if not simply a passable experience—for them is worth the additional investment because of the extra reach. At its core, being an inclusive organization means designing for the largest audience possible, which ultimately translates to higher customer adoption and engagement, higher retention and customer satisfaction, and therefore more sales and more success.

2. Legal Compliance

The U.S. courts have ruled in the landmark Robles v. Domino’s Pizza case that the American with Disabilities Act applies to not only their brick-and-mortar stores and restaurants, but to their apps and websites as well. Those who are inclined to see inclusive design as a cost rather than a benefit, the risk of legal penalties should nudge the calculus more in inclusive design’s favor.

3. Corporate Values

Doing the right thing has not always been seen as the right thing for the bottom line, but in the age of social media and value-driven Millennials, values matter. Being a role model and change agent for a better society matters, because many consumers want to support brands that support their values.

By designing for people of all abilities, we not only improve our users’ experiences, but we can also influence other businesses’ views on accessibility. When our products are developed with universal design principles in mind, we can inspire others to do the same. We become thought leaders, change makers, in a cultural shift towards a more inclusive way of interacting with one another.

The old adage is true: We do well by doing good.

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Learn more or reach out to us at OMCconsulting@oracle.com.

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