Question: What do you call a design platform that offers more than just crisp templates?
Answer: Venngage.
While templates are a great starting point, modern design platforms like Venngage go beyond aesthetics to address a crucial need in today’s diverse digital landscape.
Creating inclusive content is more important than ever. From crafting engaging onboarding documents, professional presentations, dynamic business pitches; design platforms empower users to create compelling content with ease. But the buck doesn’t stop here.
With the great power of democratizing content creation comes a greater responsibility of creating accessible design platforms (any Spiderman fans here?)
Unfortunately, most design platforms don’t get this and treat accessibility as a reluctant afterthought. Accessibility is built right into our DNA at Venngage. With our integrated accessibility features, we simplify the design process without compromising on quality.
Whether you’re an educator, a government agency, or a business, Venngage makes it easy to create designs that everyone can enjoy, without the hassle.
Want to know how we did it? Listen to the in-depth discussion between accessibility specialists Chad Chelius and Dax Castro and Venngage CEO, Eugene Woo on our platform’s unique accessibility journey.
Venngage ensures your designs meet accessibility standards right from the start. Discover why it’s more than just a competitor to Canva or other popular design tools.
Click to jump ahead:
- Rise of accessible design
- The Venngage commitment
- Challenges and innovation
- Comparison with Canva
- Future directions
- Conclusion
The rise of accessible design
Accessible design ensures products and services can be used by everyone, regardless of abilities. It involves creating experiences that are inclusive to all kinds of users.
When you design for accessibility, you’re not just catering to a select few, or ticking off some boxes for the sake of it, you’re expanding the reach of your content to everyone. That means making sure your websites, apps, and digital experiences reach people who might be navigating with a screen reader, or those who struggle with cognitive load, or anyone who needs a little extra support to interact with digital content.
Caring about accessible design means you’re helping everyone have the same access to information, the same chance to participate and the same experience. You wouldn’t dream of ignoring even one person from your potential audience would you? But with inaccessible design you might be doing exactly that.
Creating and sharing content that is accessible to all users, isn’t just good for them. It has a positive impact on your business too. No matter what industry you belong to, when you design with accessibility in mind, your audience notices.
They see that you’re building a brand that cares about every user. Accessible design isn’t a trend. It’s a moral, smart and necessary shift.
This was made evident to us at Venngage two years ago, when we saw some of our user requests for accessibility features.
“I think just like every other design tool out there, we didn’t really take accessibility seriously at the start and our platform has been around for a while. It’s about 10, more than 10 years old. And around, yeah, I would say about two years ago, we. You know, we kept getting these requests from, from our users, um, a lot of them from higher ed, some of them from government, uh, uh, asking us about accessibility and I’ll be honest, back then we were like, what is, what is, what do you mean an accessibility checker?’’
-Eugene Woo, CEO, Venngage
Building accessibility into Venngage was no small feat. Transforming the platform from the ground up to prioritize accessibility was a huge undertaking. Let’s see how the team went about this.
Venngage’s commitment to accessibility
When Venngage first started getting requests for accessible design features, we didn’t have the knowledge base to tackle it. The first step in our journey to accessibility was to rethink the entire user experience and how accessibility ties in at each step of the creation journey.
This involved countless hours of planning, development and testing to ensure accessibility was woven into every fiber of the platform. We had our work cut out for us.
Stepping into the world of accessibility with both feet firmly in the door meant educating ourselves about WCAG guidelines, alt-text, color contrast and the many other technical nuances of accessibility.
‘’We will take the accessibility first approach as opposed to accessibility last approach that most, I would say most tools, take.’’
-Eugene Woo, CEO, Venngage
After various iterations, rounds of testing and tweaking the platform to make it light and easy for users, we’re proud to share the pioneering accessibility features of Venngage.
Key Accessibility Features in Venngage
- Built-in accessibility checks
Venngage’s on-site accessibility checker automatically scans your design and detects areas that don’t meet accessibility standards. You get notified about missing alt text, document structure, tag order, insufficient color contrast and incorrect reading order. The checker doesn’t just highlight problems; it also offers recommendations on how to fix them.
This helps you create accessible designs without needing to be experts in accessibility guidelines or use third party apps for accessibility checks.
All you have to do is run your design through the checker as you’re creating it and get real-time feedback so you can make instant changes.
- Automatic alt text generation
AI alt text generators help you add context by making your images accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. By ensuring that screen readers can understand your images, you’re not only enhancing the user experience but also demonstrating your commitment to inclusivity.
If you use a lot of graphs, images and charts in your designs, you’re familiar with feeling at a loss of words sometimes, even if describing a simple visual. It happens to the best of us.
The AI alt text generator from Venngage helps you generate accurate and concise descriptions for images with just a click. This is extra helpful if you’re new to writing alt text.
It also reduces your mental load required in thinking up new descriptions each time, so you can focus on your creativity while we help you meet accessibility standards.
- User education
In creating a platform that allows users to create accessible designs from the first step of the process, Venngage spotted an opportunity. A chance to nudge users towards accessibility, many of whom didn’t even realize why these features mattered.
To see this in action, sign in to Venngage and choose from our range of accessible templates for your design. You’ll notice that you’re being guided toward accessibility, throughout the design process.
For example, while working on a design, you receive prompts explaining why certain accessibility features—like proper heading structure or color contrast—matter. This isn’t just a “check if it passes” kind of prompt. It’s a learning moment.
As users interact with the tool, they gain an understanding of these important concepts, even if they don’t have a deep background in accessibility standards.
This is particularly helpful if you’re new to creating accessible designs. Take the color contrast checker, for instance. When I created my first accessible PDF just last week, I had no experience with accessible design. All I knew about ‘color contrast’ was the literal meaning of the terms. I was unsure about using the color contrast checker right, getting the right contrast ratio seemed intimidating.
To my surprise, getting the color contrast right was not difficult at all.
Each time I picked a color, the tool immediately gave me its contrast ratio. It showed me when the contrast was too low, good, or great! I got the hang of it after I repeated this a couple more times and soon the accessibility checker passed my design as accessible on all counts!
Challenges and innovation
“Do we just want to rebuild the same platform? Like, like you said, Canva and a lot of all the other competitors out there, have it just be, you know, another version of the same thing.
And we said, no, like, let’s, let’s build something different. Let’s build something that is an unmet need. Yeah. And it was, it is probably still is an unmet need that our user users want. And we’ve looked at everything, but like accessibility is an unmet need. There is a lot of people who need it and it doesn’t appear that anyone’s building it.’’
-Eugene Woo, CEO, Venngage
Technical hurdles
Developing features like automatic alt-text generation and precise color contrast checkers was uncharted territory. No existing design platform has these features built-in natively. We pioneered accessibility features from scratch, so they could be a seamless part of our platform.
Integrating these features seamlessly into the design workflow was another challenge. The team had to ensure that accessibility checks didn’t disrupt the creative process but instead became a natural and regular part of it. For accessible PDF creation for instance, processes like PDF remediation to make the design accessible was an existing option.
Venngage was clear about not making our users take that tedious, time and cost-intensive process to create designs that all users can enjoy.
Resource allocation
With limited bandwidth, tough choices had to be made. Instead of chasing shiny objects like advanced AI features, the team at Venngage made strategic decisions to double down on accessibility. Our focus was clear from the start.
But this also meant diverting significant resources and extending development timelines. The result? The gamble paid off.
By making accessibility a priority, we’ve been able to carve our unique place in the design space, while demonstrating a commitment to inclusive design that goes beyond surface-level features.
This focus on accessibility has allowed us to create a more user-friendly experience for all, ensuring that even with their smaller size, we could make a significant impact by providing a tool that supports inclusive and accessible content creation.
Comparison with Canva
Canva is a fantastic tool, but it’s not without flaws. While it’s great for quickly whipping up designs, its accessibility features leave much to be desired.
For instance, Canva allows you to apply heading levels to different parts of your document, but the structure doesn’t always translate accurately to PDF exports. It loses its accessibility because screen readers can’t make meaning of content in the right order without the right heading levels.
Ultimately, users who rely on screen readers to understand PDFs lose out on valuable content due to an incorrect reading order and missing tags.
If you’re using Canva to create complex designs with multiple layers and interactive elements, accessibility becomes an even bigger challenge. You’ll have to depend on plugins or third-party apps to check for accessibility compliance, make lots of manual adjustments and have your creation process severely slow down because of these hurdles.
An accessible alternative to Canva is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. It benefits everyone—from business owners to individuals with disabilities.
‘’I was thinking about this Dax, when you and I, you and I were on a team’s meeting when we were playing around with Venngage and I wish we would have recorded it, right? Oh yeah. Because as we’re going through it, we’re like, dude, I can add alt text to this figure.
Or, you know, Dax is like, dude, the color contrast picker is, you know, and, and we just, we’re discovering all of this stuff like on the fly. And it was such a really cool experience and we were so impressed, you know, because Dax and I are used to products that honestly, you know, have implemented minimal accessibility, right?’‘
-Chad Chelius, Chax Chat Podcast
Compared to Canva, Venngage stands out in the realm of accessibility for a variety of reasons. Accessibility is a priority on our platform from the outset, so that you create designs that can be viewed and used all by types of users.
Right from the in-built accessibility checker, AI-alt text generator, visual simulator, color contrast checker, to the export formats Venngage supports, you can be sure your design remains accessible even after it is downloaded as a PDF.
Venngage is well-suited for a wide range of groups whether you’re a business, an educator or even a designer who is new to creating accessible designs.
Making inclusive design the mainstay of our platform, instead of an add-on, gives Venngage a distinct edge over Canva, especially for users who value accessibility as a core element of their content creation process.
Future directions for Venngage
What’s next for Venngage?
- We’re gearing up to further enhance the platform’s accessibility to and usability through several strategic initiatives. The main focus here is integrating complex diagramming capabilities.
- Useful for business, tech, education; anyone looking for an effective way to simplify complex information.
Common uses:
- Flowcharts that help break down intricate procedures into easy-to-follow steps, and are used in onboarding or knowledge transfer documents.
- Organizational charts help share hierarchical data by helping you visualize the structure of teams or companies.
By adding accessible templates of organizational charts and flowcharts, which have widespread usage and high visual appeal, we want to expand our user base across a wider range of industries.
Another area we’re prioritizing is creation of accessible content.
- AI will play an important role here. By refining the automatic generation of alt text for images and charts, the platform will give you a strong foundation for building accessible designs.
- The updates in the AI-powered feature is expected to reduce the manual effort needed to meet accessibility guidelines, making the process more efficient for all users.
We will continue our user education on accessibility best practices.
Adding educational content and prompts within the platform, at relevant stages of the design process will give you the knowledge you need to create inclusive designs.
Inclusive design is the future
Our hope is to foster a community of informed users who understand the importance of accessibility, no matter their prior design skill or accessibility awareness. Ultimately, we continue to champion accessibility to be a core component of its platform.
By combining advanced features like diagramming with practical tools like AI-generated alt text and educational resources, we’re working towards a future where everyone can create and consume visually rich content, regardless of their abilities.
