Design Accessibility Basics: Color, Legibility, and Reading Order

What should nonprofits consider when thinking about design accessibility?

When you’re designing something, it’s easy to picture the person you’re designing for as… well, yourself. You know how the colors look, you can read the text, and you know exactly where to look on the page.

But not all of your audience experiences your materials the same way you do.

Accessibility is part of good design, and you don’t need to be a designer to start paying attention to some of the basics. Here are three things I think about regularly: color, legibility, and reading order.

Color

Contrast matters, whether you’re designing for print or the web. If your text and background colors are too similar, some people will have a hard time reading it, especially people with low vision or color blindness.

My go-to tool for checking contrast is the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Enter the hex codes for your foreground and background colors, and it will tell you whether the combination meets accessibility standards.

Another good rule: don’t use color as the only way to communicate something.

For example, if you’re using green and red to show a “yes” and “no,” add an icon or text label, too. That way, the meaning doesn’t depend on someone being able to distinguish between the two colors.

Legibility

This one is obvious: don’t make your text too small.

But font size isn’t the only thing that affects how easy something is to read.

A few other things to watch:

• White text on a colored background: It can be harder to read than dark text on a light background. Use it sparingly, only with larger fonts, and make sure the contrast is strong.

• Line spacing: Text that’s packed together is harder to read. A little extra space between lines can make a big difference.

• Font choice: Decorative and script fonts have their place, but they’re not a good choice for body copy. Save them for shorter bits of text where they can make an impact without making someone work to read them.

Reading Order

This one is specific to PDFs, and it’s easy to miss because it isn’t something you can see just by looking at the page.

When someone uses a screen reader to navigate a PDF, it reads the content based on the document’s tags and reading order. That order doesn’t always match the way the content looks on the page.

So, for example, a screen reader could jump from a headline to a footer, read a caption before the paragraph it belongs to, or move through the page in an order that doesn’t make sense.

That’s obviously frustrating for someone using a screen reader, and it can make an otherwise well-designed report difficult or impossible to navigate.

Setting the reading order correctly takes a little extra attention when you’re preparing a PDF, but it’s an important part of making sure the finished piece is accessible.

Why It Matters

At the end of the day, accessibility is about making sure your message reaches your audience.

Your donors, board members, program participants, volunteers, and community members aren’t all going to experience your materials in the same way. Designing with accessibility in mind means more people can read, navigate, and understand what you’re trying to say.

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Start with the basics — check your contrast, give your text room to breathe, and make sure key information isn’t communicated by color alone. Small changes add up to materials that welcome a wider audience.

FAQs

• What is design accessibility?

  Design accessibility means creating materials — print or digital — that people with a range of abilities can read, see, and understand. That includes things like color contrast for people with low vision or color blindness, legible text for easier reading, and properly tagged PDFs for screen reader users.

• How is accessible design different from typical nonprofit design?

  Accessible design starts from the question: will this work for someone whose experience of color, text, or navigation is different from mine? It’s less about changing your aesthetic and more about double-checking the choices you’re already making.

• Who needs to think about design accessibility?

  Any nonprofit creating materials meant to reach a broad audience — impact reports, newsletters, flyers, social graphics, PDFs. If your organization serves or communicates with donors, board members, volunteers, or the public, accessibility affects how many of those people can engage with what you send them.

• What results can I expect from designing with accessibility in mind?

  Materials that reach more people, more clearly. That can mean higher engagement on digital pieces, fewer people bouncing off a hard-to-read PDF, and a report that feels genuinely inclusive rather than accidentally exclusive to part of your audience.

• Why does checking contrast, legibility, and reading order work?

  Because these three areas cover the most common barriers people run into: not being able to distinguish colors, not being able to comfortably read text, and not being able to navigate a document in a logical order. Addressing them doesn’t require a redesign — just attention to details that are easy to overlook if you’re not looking for them.