If you are reading this blog post, you have already started your digital accessibility journey or are planning to make your content more accessible. Whatever the reason, it’s amazing to see you taking the initiatives to bridge the digital divide.
According to the Inviqa Digital Accessibility Report, 49% of disabled people feel excluded on the Internet and believe that the Internet doesn’t belong to them. When you create accessible content on the web, such as websites, social media posts, or marketing material, you promote inclusivity.
Starting with accessibility can be confusing. It’s best to take baby steps, understand the impact of accessible content and focus on continuous improvement. One of the best ways to start is to create accessible marketing material.
In this blog post, I will explain the step-by-step process to create an accessible flyer with Venngage’s Accessible PDF Maker.
Click to jump ahead:
- What is an accessible flyer?
- Key considerations for accessible flyer design
- Creating accessible flyers in Venngage
- Why accessibility matters?
- Additional resources on creating accessible designs
- Conclusion: Create accessible flyers with Venngage
What is an accessible flyer?
Before you learn how to design an accessible flyer, let’s understand how an accessible flyer is different from a regular marketing flyer.
Definition and explanation of accessible flyer
Think of an accessible flyer as a normal marketing flyer for promoting events, marketing your product or services, launching campaigns and sharing job listings. The only difference is that an accessible flyer is easy for people with visual impairments to read.
An accessible flyer design follows all the accessibility guidelines such as easy-to-read text, alt tags for images, high contrast between the text and the background, hierarchical structure with proper headings, etc.
Plus, an accessible flyer follows the four key principles of accessibility — the POUR framework
- Perceivable: All content, including text and images, should be easily readable.
- Operable: It should have a clear structure with a heading and sub-headings so screen readers can easily navigate the flyer.
- Understandable: The flyer should have simple and clear language with a consistent layout so the readers can easily understand the information.
- Robust: The flyer should be visible across different devices and should be read by assistive technologies. Readers should also be able to zoom in to see the images and text without losing clarity.
Let’s understand the meaning of accessibility with an example. Look at the image shared below. People with regular vision can see the different blue shades and read the text easily.
However, people with color blindness will not be able to see original document shades and face difficulty reading the text.
The document will appear green to people with partial color blindness, who cannot see blue and yellow shades.
So, accessible flyers refer to designs that people with visual impairments can easily read and understand.
Barriers to non-accessible Flyers
Now, let’s understand the common mistakes people make while creating flyers which results in inaccessibility:
- Inadequate font size: The text is too small and barely readable. Even people with regular vision might have to squint their eyes to read the text.
- Poor color contrast: It’s difficult to distinguish the text color from the background color.
- Decorative fonts: The font is too stylish that it’s difficult to make out the words.
- Missing alt text: The images and icons in the flyer don’t have an alt text, which means that screen readers can’t understand the images.
How do these barriers affect individuals with disabilities and why should you care?
Let’s say you are scrolling on Instagram and see this local food festival flyer. The text is overcrowded with images and you can see excessively colorful decorations. Even the font style seems fancy and is difficult to read. There’s just too much going on in this flyer and it requires a lot of effort to understand the important details.
Let’s see another example of a night party flyer. It’s difficult to read the black-colored text over a dark red background. Similarly, the white text below HIT MUSIC ONLY is hardly visible.
You must be wondering how difficult it is to create a simple flyer where text is easily readable. This is perhaps what disabled feel when nearly all the content they come across is inaccessible.
So, when you create a flyer, follow all accessibility guidelines correctly to ensure wider reach.
Key considerations for accessible flyer design
Ensuring accessible visual communication is not rocket science. Once you understand the challenges faced by people with disabilities and make genuine efforts to resolve the issues, you can easily create accessible designs. Here is a quick checklist you can follow to create accessible flyers:
Text and fonts
While designing a flyer, pick simple sans-serif fonts that are easy to read, such as Arial and Helvetica, Times New Roman and Calibri. Clear and legible typography makes it easier for people with low vision to read the details on the flyer.
Also use a minimum 12 font size or 16px for body text.
Color contrast
To further improve the accessibility of your flyer, use a good color contrast ratio. This means that there should be high contrast between the text and background so that readers can easily focus on the text without stressing their eyes too much.
Here is an excellent example of how you can choose color contrast:
Look at the Fresh Market Flyer Template below. The yellow text on a green background provides a high color contrast, making it easy to read the details.
You can use Venngage’s Color Contrast Checker to ensure proper color contrast in your designs.
Alt text for images
People with visual impairments use screen readers or other assistive technologies to read the text and understand the image descriptions. Hence, you need to add proper alt text for all images in your flyers. Make sure that the alt text conveys the information clearly.
Headings and structure
You should also follow a proper heading structure [H1 to H3] to organize content logically and ensure content hierarchy. H1 can be used for headings, H2 for sub-headings and H3 for text. This way, screen readers can easily navigate the flyer.
Links
If you are creating a digital flyer with a link redirecting people to a website or registration form, it’s crucial to add descriptive links by using the correct anchor text. For instance, instead of simply writing ‘Click Here’ you can write ‘Click here to register for the event.’
This provides better context and screen readers can easily navigate from one link to another.
For example, look at the template below. The Call to Action (CTA) ‘send your CV here’ gives proper context to the readers. They can understand that the email ID is given to share the CV.
Creating accessible flyers in Venngage
Now, let’s get to the much-awaited part — how to create accessible flyers in Venngage.
Step-by-step guide to creating accessibility flyers in Venngage
1. Pick a template
Start by selecting a flyer template. You can browse through our accessible documents library and pick a suitable flyer.
Or, you can even go to the Flyers category and pick a flyer template.
I am using the B2C Service Business Flyer Template as an example.
2. Customize the template
Once you have selected a flyer template, customize it as per your needs. You can add or change images and modify text.
You can even replace the icons to match your flyer’s theme. For example, I have replaced the coffee icon with a house icon to align with the home interiors theme.
3. Use Venngage’s Accessibility Checker
Once you have finalized the flyer design, it’s time to make it accessible. Go to File in the top menu and click on Accessibility. Select Accessibility Checker to see whether your flyer design meets the accessibility criteria.
The accessibility checker will show you the accessibility items missing from your design. For instance, you can see that my design has a low color contrast which makes it difficult to read the text. Also, the alt text is missing for the icons.
Similarly, you’ll get suggestions to make your design accessible. Once you work on the suggestions, go to the accessibility checker again to ensure that your flyer is accessible.
For PDF files, you can also use a free PDF accessibility checker to ensure that your document is accessible for everyone.
4. Check color contrast
Let me show you how you can fix the color contrast issue to create an accessible flyer.
- First, select a section that you want to check for color contrast. I am checking the one at the bottom left of my design.
- Now, go to the color icon on the top left (near the Brand Kit). You can see that the light blue and white color contrast is low.
- Now, move the cursor across the color bar to improve the color contrast.
5. Create alt tags
Next, write proper alt tags for each image and icon. This means you need to add proper descriptions for each image/icon so that visually impaired people can understand the image description through their screen readers or other assistive devices.
6. Create accessible color palettes
With Venngage, you can further simplify the process of creating an accessible flyer. Instead of manually dragging across the color bar for each section, you can create an accessible color palette with Venngage’s Accessible Color Palette Generator.
You can even shuffle the colors to create a random color palette.
Once you have the color palette, you can copy the HEX code of each color individually and manually apply it to your design, as shown below.
Another option is to download the palette file and you’ll get all the HEX codes to create an inclusive and engaging flyer.
BONUS: If you want to learn the step-by-step process to create an accessibility flyer in Venngage in more detail, check out this video by The Accessibility Guy:
Why Accessibility Matters?
Accessibility is no longer an option, it is a necessity for businesses to improve their customer experience and enhance brand loyalty. Also, let’s not forget the legal consequences of not adhering to accessibility standards.
Below, I will explain the major reasons you must focus on accessibility.
Legal and compliance reasons
The ADA Web Accessibility guidelines under the American Disability Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility (WCAG) Guidelines by the World Wide Web Consortium lay down mandatory standards for businesses to ensure web accessibility. These standards include adding proper alt text for images, providing captions for video and audio content, provide a ‘Skip to Content’ option, etc.
If you fail to adhere to these accessibility guidelines, you expose yourself to the risk of being involved in legal suits where you’ll have to pay hefty compensation. According to a report by UsableNet, ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits are rapidly increasing. There were 4605 accessibility lawsuits in 2023 and the fine for such lawsuits is $75,000 for the first violation.
Depending on your company’s size and the level of violation, you might even have to pay a huge fine or settlement amount to settle the lawsuits. For instance, Target paid $6 million to settle a class action lawsuit by the National Blind Federation (NFB) on grounds of inaccessibility.
Ethical considerations
Keeping the legal requirements aside, as humans it’s our ethical duty to make the world more equitable. When you create accessible flyers, websites, PDFs, or other digital content, you promote equal access to information for disabled people.
Imagine you work in a global company. Your colleagues who live in a different region have access to a particular tool that makes it easier for them to perform their tasks. However, you can’t access the tool because it’s not available in your region.
Now the colleagues who perform the task using the particular tool are able to achieve greater results and receive more acknowledgement. How would you feel? Probably unfair and undervalued. You’d demand equity and fair treatment, and rightly so.
This is exactly how people with visual impairments might feel. So, make accessibility a priority in your organization to promote respect and foster a diverse and inclusive society.
Business benefits
Accessibility is also important from a business perspective. It gives you better brand recognition and builds customer loyalty. According to research by McKinsey, People with visual impairments tend to avoid brands or market segments altogether because of inaccessibility. Moreover, disabled consumers rely on companies that deliver hassle-free digital interactions.
The State of Digital Accessibility Report also highlights the benefits of accessibility for businesses:
We even connected with many leaders to understand how accessibility impacts businesses. Here are the results.
1. Expand reach
Creating accessible content and websites promotes reach as people share it further in their network. A study on Barriers and Opportunities to Accessible Social Media Content tells that social media users with disabilities engage more with textual and non-visual content. That’s often because the images don’t have appropriate captions or alt text. So, by adhering to accessibility practices, there’s a possibility of more people reading and engaging with your flyers.
Riccardo Ocleppo, the founder and CEO of Open Institute of Technology (OPIT), says that introducing inclusive content was highly appreciated by their user base. This initiative led to an increase in user engagement and the utilization of their materials, reaching more than 20M registered users worldwide.
2. Enhance customer experience
By creating accessible flyers, marketing materials and products, you promote inclusivity and enhance user experience.
One of our most rewarding moments was receiving positive feedback from a visually impaired customer who appreciated our high-contrast journal options. They expressed how our products made journaling more enjoyable and accessible, highlighting the impact of our commitment to inclusivity.
Karen Chen, Manager at Journaling Supplies
3. Increase user engagement
Creating accessible content also boosts user engagement as more people can read and understand it.
Our email campaigns got a major accessibility upgrade, and we’re stoked about the results. We saw increased engagement from folks who previously couldn’t interact with our emails. This wasn’t just a numbers win; it showed that accessible content opens doors for more people to connect with our offerings.
One of our biggest wins was revamping a client’s e-commerce website, which led to a 15% increase in engagement after making it fully accessible. This project proved that accessible design benefits both users and businesses.
Taylor Moore, Co-founder of Teasy Agency
4. Improve brand reputation
When you make accessibility a core value of your business, you start gaining trust in the industry and people are more inclined to connect with your brand.
Matt Bellerose, Founder of Lobster Order, says that their recent campaign on sustainable seafood practices was a success because their content was accessible. They also reached a wider audience-including people who would typically have poor access to such information. This inclusivity went a long way in enhancing their brand reputation and improving engagement across their platforms.
Additional resources on creating accessible designs
If you want to learn more about creating accessible designs, you can read AccessAbility 2: A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design by The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD), Canada’s largest professional association for graphic designers.
Conclusion: Create accessible flyers with Venngage
Flyers are an excellent and cost-effective marketing tool to promote your services and events. You can create engaging flyers and share them online or distribute printed flyers for localized marketing.
However, if you want to increase your reach and enhance customer loyalty, it’s important to create accessible flyers. Easily design accessible flyers with Venngage’s Accessible PDF Maker!
