The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are accessibility guidelines for digital and web design. Following these guidelines ensures that colors are contrasted enough to help those with vision impairment to see and read your designs properly. This also goes hand-in-hand with typographic size, to ensure its readability along with the colors.
In a world that should be more inclusive, adding accessible elements to your designs will only elevate your work and allow you to share it with more people.
What Is the WCAG Ratio?
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WCAG stands forWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines. The WCAG helps anyone designing or creating for the web or internet to ensure their designs hit accessibility targets. This means your designs can be enjoyed and used by anyone, without excluding those with visual impairments or other disabilities when possible.
The WCAG ratio sets the minimum ratios to hit target accessibility. This includes color contrast and text size, both of which ensure those with visual impairments have a better chance of seeing, interacting with, and using your designs. Not only does hitting the WCAG ratio help those with visual impairments, but it also increases the user experience for all web users.
TheWorld Wide Web Consortium develops standards for web development. While there are no set rules for web accessibility, the WCAG sets a standard to follow that any web designer should adhere to.
When testing contrast ratios, the WCAG suggests an A to AAA rating. An A rating shows the lowest contrast levels. AA are mid-range contrast levels with a ratio of 4.5:1—considered the minimum ratio. Finally, AAA is the highest contrast level. If designing for everyone, your contrast levels are best when between an AA and AAA range.
Why Is the WCAG Ratio Important in Graphic and Web Design?
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Graphic design and web design shouldn’t just make information look pretty. Information design informs the masses—this means making your information accessible to all. WCAG implementation ensures accessible designs for those with visual impairment, dyslexia, neurodivergence, or anything that affects someone’s sight or reading ability.
Web and digital design—as well as programming—already have established accessibility features in place. For example,Windows provides helpful accessibility tools for users, and it’s already commonplace for most YouTube videos to offersubtitles or captions. But we can always improve on accessibility.
Global design creates better design. The more people who can engage with your design, the more successful it is, and the more reach it has. Not only is it good for you as a designer to reach more people, but it’s better for the world that fewer people are excluded.
Designing with the WCAG ratio and accessibility features in your designs will have positive effects on color palettes, typography choices, and text sizes. You wouldn’t purposely design something hard to read, so why wouldn’t you include more ways to create designs with better readability for all people?
Implementing the WCAG Ratio in Your Designs
There are places you can check the WCAG ratio in your designs, such as thiscontrast checkerwebsite. But you should get into the practice of implementing accessible design features into your work anyway without relying on checking against the bare minimum.
It should be noted that the contrast guidelines do not apply to logo design. This is due to logos being presented at varying sizes and often against different backgrounds. However, it doesn’t harm you to consider the WCAG ratio when designing logos.
High-Contrast Colors
Using high-contrast colors is an easy way to add inclusivity to your designs. Colors that contrast against one another will help those with visual impairments and color blindness to see your designs better. Not only that, but even people with no impairment to their vision will better see—and engage with—your designs.
Ever attempt to read a light pink text on a light green background? It’s almost impossible. But a dark blue text on a light yellow background is much easier to see and read.
High-contrast colors work best when placing text on a color background or if using small paths in your illustrations.Khromais an AI color palette generator that comes with a built-in contrast checker—one of the many greatAI tools to help your graphic design workflow.
A great way to check the contrast is by turning your design to grayscale. If you may separate the colors and understand the design in black and gray, it should translate well in your chosen colors too.
Along with text colors being contrasted enough against background colors, your text itself should be large enough to read easily. The WCAG ratio for large text size is 3:1.
Text size isn’t equal across all typography, so don’t rely on a 12-point size—which is typically seen as the minimum size for standard readability—for all fonts. Test them out yourself or with user testers by displaying or printing real-size designs. If your colors aren’t contrasted that well, then bigger text will aid readability, as a workaround.
Font Readability
It goes without saying, but the fonts you choose in your designs need to be easily readable. Decorative fonts, cursive fonts, or hand-drawn fonts often have readability issues. Heavy metal bands are famous for using inherently difficult-to-read typefaces for their band logos, for example.
You should also consider kerning and tracking when using your text for small designs. Letter spacing can also affect the intended readability of words.
Inclusive Accessibility Factors
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While only color contrast, font size, and readability of text in web design are considered in WCAG ratios, you should make all your web and graphic designs with inclusivity in mind.
If you’re a web designer working with a programmer or coder, ensure you’reusing HTML techniques that aid in web accessibility. There are alsoaccessibility features in Canvato expand the reach of your designs with your audience.
You shouldn’t just stop at the minimum requirements for the WCAG ratios; if you have control over adding alt text to images, captions to audio or video files, or even helpful wording of text for hyperlinks—which are read aloud by screen readers—you should go above and beyond. Including accessibility features doesn’t exclude any audience—it only invites more people in.
Designing With the WCAG Ratio Improves Designs for All
The standards for web design come from the World Wide Web Consortium, a community that aids in best practices across the web. The consortium developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which web designers should follow. This provides a ratio standard for visibility checks when designing for the web.
Following these guidelines and ratio standards means your web designs can be accessed by more people.
