Accessible design: what you need to know to brief your agency

There are various things you’ll need to know and questions you’ll need to ask yourself about your project before briefing your agency on an accessibility job. If you don’t have all the answers beforehand, you can work with your agency to help determine what these are.

1. What are you trying to achieve?
   As with any brief, start with asking yourself what challenges you are trying to solve.

2. Who is your audience?
   Understanding your audience is crucial to any brief, but with accessibility this will need to go one step further to consider their varying abilities. For example, if you’re producing written content, have you considered your audience’s reading age? Different options for different audiences can be a great solution and one your agency can advise on.

3. What content are you creating?
   Is it a written document? Or is it a visual or animation? What is the file format? Defining exactly what your content is and what it contains is your first step. This is crucial to helping your agency understand exactly what they are working with from the get-go.

4. How accessible are your brand guidelines?
   Do your brand guidelines use typefaces and colour contrasts that meet accessibility guidelines? Understanding the accessibility of your brand guidelines, and perhaps even making the necessary adjustments to them to make them more accessible, can ensure all future materials meet the same accessibility criteria and makes working with multiple agencies easier for you in the long run.

5. Where is the file going to be used?
   Is it a piece of digital content? Will it live online, or will it be included in an email? Is it a template for continuous future use? Many of the accessibility standards to meet will depend largely on where and how your content will be used.

6. What is your budget?
   Your budget will play a significant role in determining how accessible the project can be. Broadly speaking the wider or more complex the audience needs or document type are, the more budget will be required. However, working within a budget from the start helps ensure the top priorities are met first.

Accessible design is important as it helps to make sure that no one is excluded from accessing your content. If you’d like to work with our team of accessibility specialists to make your content and communications more accessible, get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to discuss how our accessibility consultancy services can help you meet your goals.