Web design brand guidelines: web accessibility

By Rob Marshall

SUMMARY

Web accessibility standards are constantly developing and your brand guidelines need to keep on top of the changes. Rob Marshall, Creative Director at the full-service digital solutions provider Splitpixel guides as through how to evolve your brand guidelines to ensure your digital presence is accessible to all.

Since 2008 I’ve used countless brand guideline documents when designing websites. Back when I started, there wasn’t much of a conversation about accessibility – the overall aesthetic was all people were worried about.

This means that, in the 16 years since, as web accessibility standards have developed, more and more brand guidelines have started to fall short when it comes to specific guidance on web styles. But that’s not to say they need scrapping and starting again.

Your brand is not a book. It is the life force of your organisation. Some guidelines go back years or even decades, and the equity in them only continues to grow as brands mature.

A brand design project that sees you updating your brand guidelines requires some careful consideration and a strategic approach. But the biggest component for change is a willingness to evolve your brand in the name of better experience for all. Hands holding an ipd showing a Creative Climate page by Julie's Bicycle. The right hand part of the screen shows colour swatches.

Things change – especially in web design and branding

Web design is a fickle friend – sometimes we look back at websites we made in the earlier days of Splitpixel, and can’t imagine designing something in the same way.

Trends come and go – parallax scrolls were a must-have feature a few years ago and now they’re relegated to a more subtle feature, for example. More recently, custom animations are coming back around in a big way because of new filetypes and processes that make them more efficient.

But even more important than the winds of fashion are the winds of standards. The widely used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), insisted upon by government and Arts Council projects, among many others, are updating all the time.

WCAG 2.2 was introduced in October 2023, and WCAG3 is in a draft format as of May 2024. These impact a lot of elements of accessible web design and development – and your brand is not immune.

Accessible brand design challenges

Challenges for brands most commonly take two forms: contrast ratios of brand colours, and legibility of brand typefaces. Colour and font are pretty fundamental to brand identity – but don’t panic. They’re not as restrictive as you might think.

The rules on colour contrast use a bunch of numbers and phrases like “relative luminance” to essentially say that text colours need to be placed on background colours that are mathematically different enough as to not blend together.

For typefaces, there are rules on spacing, as well as guidance suggesting against the use of thin strokes, unusual features, unfamiliar characters, and cursive scripts.

While exceptions to these rules are made for your logo, they’re still worth keeping in mind. These standards exist so people can understand content – do you want a logo that people struggle to read?

Using accessible colours

Even if your particular brand hex doesn’t pass contrast tests on seemingly ANY background, there’s always things you can do.

Does your text NEED to be presented in your brand colour? Could it be in black or white to contrast with a branded background? Are there NO other ways of bringing in your brand colours – such as icons, illustrations, or elements that don’t interact with the text?

Ok, sometimes the answer is no, and you might have to consider some “digital tweaks” such as physically altering the hex for web, just enough to pass accessibility standards. Often, these changes are pretty much imperceptible to the eye – the average user isn’t going to notice.

But always consider this: the sacrifice you are making of the integrity of your visual identity is directly benefiting users with additional needs. We’re hard-pressed to find a brand that doesn’t consider that a valuable exchange.

Using accessible fonts

Some brands use typefaces that are naturally difficult for certain users to comprehend. Although branding agencies might approach an identity differently now as compared to just five years ago, it isn’t suddenly a crime.

But making sure your website is either built using technologies that interface well with accessibility tools, or that offers a comprehensive level of support to users of all types, is something you should absolutely commit to.

For example, you can stick with your branded font, provided that your website is built with a function to provide an alternative accessible one if a user has software that strips out styles for accessibility reasons.

Incorporating accessible web design into your brand guidelines

The primary function of brand guidelines is to ensure consistency of identity across all media. So the moment you deviate from this with a fresh set of web styles, there is a worry that the whole thing collapses, right?

But this doesn’t have to be the case. A good accessible web design agency should be able to provide you with digital style guides that you can either incorporate into your existing brand guidelines, or simply follow across all of your digital communications. All of your offline visual identity can remain 100% true to your trusty brand guideline document – if the agency does their job well, they’ll all work together just right.

Rob Marshall head and shoulders