We design accessible websites for a web without barriers

It is often thought that accessibility does not concern one’s own company’s target audience, but that is not the case. Accessibility concerns everyone: people with visual impairments or who are blind, but also those with low vision or color blindness; people with permanent or temporary mobility issues, such as someone navigating a site on a jolting bus. Accessibility concerns people with cognitive conditions, such as dyslexia or ADHD, as well as the elderly and those with lower literacy levels.

According to a European Council survey, approximately 27% of people in Europe have some form of disability—that’s one in four adults. As the average age of the population increases, these numbers are destined to rise.

A design focused on accessibility improves information organization and optimizes the resources used by your site, reducing the amount of data to be downloaded and making it faster to load on your users’ devices and beyond. An accessible site will also be less polluting.

Accessibility rules also involve HTML semantics—the same structure that Google and search engines use to index web pages. If a site is accessible to people, it will be accessible to web crawlers as well: this makes it easier to climb the rankings in search results.

For us at PaperPlane, designing for accessibility means striving for a fairer world, even online. Committing to the removal of barriers, allowing everyone to have the same opportunities, means working with disability as an essential parameter for inclusive design, eliminating every possible obstacle to the use of a specific product or website.

It is a poor interface that makes an individual disabled. Choosing accessibility means making an ethical choice that embraces the value of inclusivity. A choice that makes your brand socially conscious and capable of speaking to a broader audience.