Consultancy for accessible design

Accessible Design is Profitable Design, the ROI is massive.

A great online shopping experience makes happy returning customers! And that’s best explained by examples of a bad experience. Let me take you on a little journey of examples in daily life.

Euro-Scheine von fünf bis zweihundert Euro, einer von jeder verfügbaren Sorte.

What is accessible design?

For that you need to understand what “design” technically means. From there it’s much easier to understand what defines accessible and inaccessible design.

Design is functional

Form (design) follows function, not the other way around. Example: Expensive, artfully designed designer chairs for a fancy restaurant, on which people taller than 1.70 meters cannot sit comfortably. Beautiful art, failed design. With such chairs, many guests will leave the restaurant early and never come back.

Accessibility does not exclude an attractive design!

The main purpose of your online store is to generate revenue. If the artistic factor in the design gets in the way of finding, ordering, and paying for your products or services, you will exclude an unexpectedly high number of potential customers.

„Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.“

Steve Jobs, co-founder Apple

The result of a bad experience is the same in physical and online stores. Your potential customer leaves and doesn’t come back!

With an inclusive, accessible design, many bad experiences in an online store can be avoided.

Further down this page, you’ll find some real-life examples that many can relate to. They are annoyances we all know. Even if you are not disabled (yet) and do not need assistive technology (yet).

How you can avoid usability problems in your new store and significantly increase your sales potential:

That’s where I come in. And if you want to maximize the user experience through accessible, inclusive design at a reasonable cost, make sure to get me on board long before mood boards, copy, and functionality are set in stone.

I’ll be the one to bring all parties involved in the creation of your web store up to speed. The graphic design team, the developers, the people who write copy and create and upload media like images and videos for products and blog articles.

Book a free introductory consult

Barriers by design

Daily horror shop experiences we can all identify with

It’s impossible to choose, everything looks the same

Adding a color panel to filter on in your web shop is no use to someone who is color-blind (1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women), when it does not have the description too.

Regular Vision

Two rows of four colored squares. The first row consists of yellow, orange, green and red. The second row consists of fuchsia pink, purple, blue and yellow-brown.

Deuteranopia

Two rows of four colored squares. The first row consists of sand color, ocher yellow, slightly lighter ocher yellow and yellow-brown. The second row consists of taupe, blue, blue and yellow-brown.

Protanopia

Two rows of four colored squares. The first row consists of yellow, light olive green, another light olive green and a dark olive green. The second row consists of gray blue, blue, slightly darker blue and dark olive green.

Tritanopia

Zwei Reihen mit vier farbigen Quadraten. Die erste Reihe besteht aus sehr hellem Rosa, etwas dunklerem Rosa, hellem Grau und leuchtendem Rot. Die zweite Reihe besteht aus leuchtendem Rot, dunklem Mauve, dunklem Grün und etwas hellerem Mauve.

And then there’s achromatopsia, for example, where you can only distinguish shades of gray.

Curious about how this affects the way you approach web design?

Book a free introductory consultation. I look forward to bringing you up to speed quickly and giving you some food for thought.

The directions make no sense to you

You can't find the way because there are no signs. And the person at the counter explains it to you in a most incomprehensible way.

You can't find your way around the store

Not being able to find your way around a web shop can have several causes. Because navigation is based on symbols without text, for example. Not everyone understands all these symbols! Or because navigation is based on colours which sucks for people who are colour-blind (1 in 12 men), and many more.

The music is so loud, you can't hear yourself think

Sliders, video backgrounds and animations have that same effect on people with cognitive disabilities (ADHD and autism, for example).

But even for people who are simply tired, a moving circus sucks.

You can't get in, because…

In a physical store this can have various reasons. Because you can’t climb the stairs, for example.
On a web site a simple cookie or newsletter popup can block someone who uses keyboard or voice navigation.

Speaking of smacking the door in someone’s face.

You can't read the product labels

Insufficient color contrast and small fonts are an immense barrier. Not only to people with extreme loss of vision. Also to most who are over 45.

You don’t always realise it, but at some point your vision declines. Light grey text on a white background may seem fancy. To me, for example, it’s unreadable.