Accessibility Assessment
The Science In Sport team were planning on running an extended Black Friday campaign for a month, the general concept being to make the sites primary colour black with neon elements for 'pop'. However this could potentially lead to accessibility issues for users with vision impairments.
Project Outline
The business wanted to change their website 'dark' for Black Friday but accessibility had to be considered.
Initial Steps
With this project the brand teams of both Science In Sport and PhD Nutrition came to me with their concepts of a 'blacked out' site with neon highlights in order to gain my input on whether this would work from an accessibility point of view.
The requirement from my opinion was to meet the standards of WCAG 2.1, allowing the site to be perceivable, operable and understandable.
I knew from the start that this would have some issues but there were many tools and solutions to have good accessibility as well as having the brand teams happy too.
Research
The general research for this was to look at what the brand teams were proposing as their 'want' to then use established tools rather than opinion to discover whether these needs were realistic, or whether alternatives could be found.
For my research I used tools such as;
- a Colour Contrast Analyser
- Adobe Color
- Colour Blindness Simulators
Design Process
The design process for this project was really straight forward and minimal as the design was already there.
I purely had to recommend alternatives based on my findings using the tools previously mentioned.
Following the use of the accessibility tools it was established that two changes needed to be made to the site in order to improve the accessibility. Those changes being;
- an alternative red was required for the text elements
- use of an 'off' black rather than #000000 would improve the final outcome significantly
Stoppers
The biggest stopper to this project was the stubborn side of the brand teams who had what they wanted and had to be convinced to make changes quite late on in order to meet the required standards.
Outcome
Overall, this was a short and easy project. Though convincing the team of the changes and why they were need provided some challenge.
However, the recommended changes were accepted and implemented. Allowing the site to reach the required standards needed for accessibility.
