Professional Design #1

The Top Ten Tips for Digital Accessibility

Design and Intent:

The Purpose of this design is to provide a visually appealing quick reference card that promotes inclusive digital content creation. It addresses the ways that content creators can work  to meet accessibility standards. This design breaks complex guidelines (like WCAG standards) into user friendly, actionable tips. The target audience this design is intended for is content creators or web developers at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. It is a supplemental Job-Aid that supports the initiative led by the Digital Accessibility Office. They wrote the Top Ten Tips and posted them on their website. I really liked these tips and thought it would be helpful to have a way for content creators to quickly glance down as they are working and use them as a checklist. I created this as a Quick Reference Card to supplement more in-depth reading and training from the Digital Accessibility Office. For that reason, the last tip includes reaching out to the DAO for further questions and support.  This card is meant to be printed, back-to-back, and placed on the desk at their workstation for quick and easy reference.

Our University is working to make all digital content accessible by April 2026 and one of the most important ways to do this is by raising awareness and helping employees to implement these tips in their workflow. The more that employees read and refer to these top ten tips, the more they will implement these practices into the content creation process from the very beginning.

Reflection and Analysis:

During my design process, I started by thinking about the end product.Once of the challenges I faced was deciding which product I wanted to use and what size it needed to be. I decided to use the portrait infographic template on Canva. Then I looked for a template that would support the content. I found a flow chart that had room for 5 topics. I didn't want to add too much content in the amount of space I had on one side, so I decided to create a front and back. That way it would reduce the cognitive load by keeping the text and spacing a good size and still having some whitespace. I also liked this template because it had a place for a visually appealing icon that I could customize to represent each of the ten tips. Additionally, the color matched the Carolina Blue color palette that I work with too. The text in the template was clear and bold so I stuck with it. 

Overall, my choice to go with the Top Ten Tips and use the Portrait Infographic to create the product, led to a successful design product. One of the most important goals of implementing accessibility standards is applying the strategies from the very beginning of the process. A lot of times, content creators might design and develop their digital content and then go to the website to make their content accessible. However, it is much more efficient and realistic to implement accessibility standards from the very beginning. With this quick reference card, it supports this goal of implementing these guidelines from the start of a project.