Most people are fortunate enough to not have been born or developed any type of impairments that may cause them to adjust the way they go about their daily lives. Thus, when designing something for others, it’s easy to only see things from only your own perspective and completely forgetting that not everyone can see or do things as “normally” as you might.

Accessibility isn’t really something you ever hear people speak about, and if they do, it’s so brief, it’s as if they had never said anything on the matter at all. What Geri Coady, the speaker of this webinar, mentions is exactly this issue: accessibility practices are always overlooked in design. Although her lecture focused on color blindness in particular, it doesn’t change the fact that accessible needs are rarely thought about. When a person interacts with something on a daily basis, such as color, it’s easy to look over how being able to see colors as they are may be problematic for some.

To better understand how a person who is colorblind may experience the world, she first defines the term colorblind, which she states is “decreased ability to see color or tell colors apart form each other. She then proceeds to explain why we, as designers, should bother to care in the first place, which is to help alleviate the frustrations a user with accessibility needs might have, and how it could also potentially lead to legal problems. She briefly mentions a case between three blind women from California and how they took legal actions against a fortune 500 company for not having their website be accessible to screen readers, which is a case they won in the end. She even further goes on to give visual examples of what extreme cases of color blindness might look like to a person with this impairment.

According to Geri, the most important things to think about when designing for accessibility users are the following:

• contrast: creates focus and hierarchy; draws the eye to the most important areas of a design or painting; can increase legibility for persons with visual impairments
  • light/dark contrasts
  • complimentary color contrasts
  • cool and warm contrasting colors, where a dark shade of a cool color is used with a light tint of a warm color

Another thing is to consider first working in grayscale when designing and then adding color to your project afterwards. If the design in grayscale has a good balance of contrast, chances are the design’s contrast will still work when color is applied.

She even supplied a couple of resources to use for colors that keep color blindness in mind: http://colorbrewer2.org/ Color Brewer was originally designed for color coding of maps, but with its ability to download a palette for use in photoshop or illustrator, it could easily be used for any designer’s needs.

She also goes over how colors should be labeled when colors are used as option choices for websites, such as clothing website. It helps colorblind people know what they’re shopping for, allows screen readers to read it, and allows all users narrow down what they’re looking for.

She also covers something called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which according to the w3.org website, “defines how to make Web content more accessible to people with disabilities.” She also goes over the different levels that people must meet when using contrasting colors for the web. She also provides sources to use when trying to ensure the colors chosen for a website meet the proper contrasting ratios: http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-ratio/

Overall, I learned a lot from watching Geri’s webinar that I never knew about. For example, I had no idea there were web guidelines for accessibility or how important contrasting colors on the web in general were for people with colorblindness. All in all, it was a very informative lecture that I was glad I took the time to see.