Branding and Accessibility

Traditionally, the only real measure of a successful branding project is the aesthetic outcome. A brand needs to be a reflection of the spirit and values of the organisation it represents, but ultimately, it has to look good.

All the web and product work we do involves a high level of accessibility input. Accessibility is baked into our experience and development processes at a core level, we are passionate about ensuring that the products and services we create are usable by everyone.

Until recently there was one Tenacity Works service where accessibility hadn’t traditionally been a major consideration and that was Brand Design. Accessibility had only ever been tangentially related to the development of brands and that was primarily when it came to determining the suitability of selected brand colours on the web.

Enter our good friends at Little Forest. Through consultancy, training and specialist software, Little Forest enables organisations responsible for substantial online content to effectively monitor and manage material to improve customer experience. In other words, LittleForest is all about accessibility.

Unsurprisingly then, when Little Forest approached us to discuss a full rebrand, their primary metric for success wasn’t aesthetics but rather accessibility. This blew our minds. We’d never worked on a branding project where the key ask wasn’t to make our client look good!

When designing for accessibility it is important to realise that nearly 15% of your users experience some form of disability. 250 million people worldwide have a visual impairment, which includes anyone from legally blind to those having less than 20/20 vision.

1. This is the WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.4.3 pass indicator (minimum contrast) for fonts below 18 points
2. This is the WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.4.6 pass indicator (enhanced contrast) for fonts below 18 points
3. This is the WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.4.3 pass indicator (minimum contrast) for fonts over 18 points
4. This is the WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.4.6 pass indicator (enhanced contrast) for fonts over 18 points
5. This is based on brightness and colour difference. A pass grade here means you are fully colour compliant.
6. How readable is your text for people with colour blindness?

Key things to consider

1. What are the brand applications?
2. What level of accessibility are you working to?

Who else thinks about this stuff?

Having worked on this project for LittleForest, we were curious to see which other organisations had considered accessibility when reworking their brands. We looked at the brands of five top UK banks and ran them through the same accessibility and contrast tools we used to evaluate the Little Forest brand as well as our other accessibility projects.

Useful Tools & Resources

1. Digital Accessibility at Harvard University
2. Acart Contrast Checker
3. Able Figma accessibility plugin
4. WebAIM contrast checker

Conclusion

We’ve learned a great deal about accessible branding working on the Little Forest rebrand. Get in touch now and let Tenacity Works help you navigate the process with our brand strategy and design experience.