For the past four months, I have been working hard leading the development of the Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) new handbook on accessible graphic design. I am immensely proud of the work we have done together. The book has finally been released, and I encourage everyone to download the book for free from the RGD website. If you are curious to know more about this text, and the story behind the pages, please read on…
The Good Books
The original RGD AccessAbility book was published in 2010. It provided designers with a general overview of best practices for accessible graphic design. In 2015, the RGD followed up with a second AccessAbility book, focused specifically on accessible web design. While these books were targeted towards the professional graphic design community, they found their way into the hands of a secondary audience of non-professional designers. I was pleased to see some of my students referencing the books in class, and I was thrilled to see that some of my clients had obtained the books and were referencing them in meetings and RFPs. I started leaving behind copies of the books at every pitch meeting with a new client. I even had potential clients call me back to ask what certain things in the books meant.
The Squeaky Wheel gets the Work
As enthusiastic as I was about the RGD AccessAbility handbooks, I also had some criticisms. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, as I have criticisms of everything, particularly things that I care about. I shared my criticisms with Hilary Ashworth, the Executive Director of the RGD. Some time later, she came back to me and asked me if I was willing and able to make any necessary revisions to bring the books up to date, as well as potentially consolidating the two books into one volume.
How could I say no?
I got to work right away with the following mandate.
1. Accuracy above all.
My first mandate was to ensure that everything in the books was accurate, and up to date. This meant that every single assertion, source, and resource from the original books would be reviewed, and current best research sources would be sought out to ensure everything was still relevant and accurate.
The RGD had also asked me to assess the possibility of combining the two texts. It quickly became apparent that the potential advantages of this merger far outweighed the potential disadvantages, and so this quickly became the second mandate.
2. Combine the two texts into one single book.
The 2010 book was focused on accessible graphic design in general, including web design, while the 2015 book was focused exclusively on web design. As one would expect, there was some redundancy between the books. This led to the third mandate.
3. Eliminate redundancy from the text.
As I worked to remove these redundancies, I noticed a recurring problem. There was some valuable information included in media-specific sections of the book, that had much broader applicability. If this information were added to the sections on other media, it would create redundancy. So beyond de-duplicating information, we also needed to restructure information so that common principles were presented before any media specific considerations. This became the fourth mandate.
4. Re-structure the information with a hierarchal structure separating common content from media specific content.
At this point, I was digging pretty deep into the manuscript, and found that I was flagging nearly every single sentence for alteration. Most of the old content was still good, but the language usage wasn’t always accessible for a non-professional designer audience. The more I tried to make changes to the manuscript, the more I became convinced that the single biggest opportunity for improvement in the books would be a re-write with more accessible language usage. This became the fifth mandate.
5. Accessible language usage for greater clarity of communication to all audiences, particularly non-designers.
Beyond language usage, I thought there was another opportunity to make the books more accessible and useful. Previous versions included a section of large case studies, somewhat segregated from the main text. I wanted to remove this case studies section, and instead integrate small case studies throughout the text to more directly support the content. This became the sixth mandate.
6. Integrate visual examples into the main text to increase understanding.
Hilary had asked for necessary revisions to bring the books up to date, but looking back at the first mandate for accuracy, I realized that this would not be enough. Bringing the books up to date today might mean that tomorrow they were out of date and inaccurate. Since the first RGD AccessAbility book was published nine years ago, I decided that the new book should be written to be accurate for at least a decade.
Regardless of how unrealistic a goal this might prove to be, I believed it was an important consideration for both the content included in the book, and how that content is presented and qualified. This became the seventh mandate.
7. Minimum one decade shelf-life considered for all content.
In order to write for a long shelf-life, I looked to the example set by the World Wide Web Consortium’s WCAG 2.0. This text moved away from the prescriptive content of the first version of the document, in favour of more principle based content in the second version. I wanted our new book to focus more on explaining the underlying principles and human factors that inform accessible design.
Looking back at the guidelines I had established for the project, I realized that many of the mandates I was imposing on the project were aimed at our secondary audience of non-professional designers. But would about professional designers? And what about professional designers who had already read the previous books? I wanted this new book to have something for everyone involved in the design process, including experienced professionals. The book would have to be both more immediately accessible, while also going farther in depth and detail than the previous texts. And for that, we were going to need a bigger boat.
“When you get to the fork in the road, take it.” —Yogi Berra.
Along with an ever-growing team of supportive co-writers and collaborators (including RGDs Eric Forest, James Kuo, Randal Boutilier, and Edmund Li), I was working on the book with reckless abandon. The first full draft of the manuscript was complete, and it seemed like it would be approximately 88 pages worth of content. We reached this milestone at the same time that we discovered that the printing budget would only cover 48 pages.
This was a heartbreaking moment for me.
Randal Boutilier immediately suggested a humane solution: we produce two different versions of the book. The full Supersized version would be digital only, and could be as long as we needed it to be. The second version would be print only, limited to 48 pages, and we would call it the Essentials edition.
The RGD had a mandate for this print edition. It would be used as the prescribed accessibility text for candidates taking the RGD Certification exam. Any questions about accessibility on the exam would have to be drawn from the content of the Essentials text. This provided clearcut guidance for what could or should be omitted, and what was, well, essential. Edits were made with the following mandates.
- Content that was not exam worthy would be considered for omission. This meant that anything that was open to debate, or simply less important, should be omitted.
- Content with a potentially shorter shelf-life would be considered for omission. While the book had purposely been written to have long term relevance, there was still a significant amount of “how-to” information that would likely change over time, and could be dropped, as long as the underlying principles were retained.
- Since visual diagrams and examples always supported content in the text, they could be considered for omission on a case by case basis if the benefits of the additional space for text outweighed the detriments of lacking a visual reference.
- Whenever possible, we would try to cut entire sections. This would hopefully help reduce confusion between the texts, by having entire chapters or sections either present, or omitted.
The Essentials edition went to print in late April 2019, and was delivered at the Design Thinkers conference in Vancouver, a month later. During that month we continued to work on the Supersized edition, finishing the additional content, and delivering it as an accessible PDF in time for the conference as well.
What are the differences between the two books?
The Essentials edition is print-only, and the Supersized edition is available as an accessible PDF, although it may be made available in print as well. The Essentials edition has the following content omitted.
- 100% of the “Planning & Management” section (~3 pages) was omitted, as this was information based on designers personal experiences, and some of it may be open to debate.
- 10% of the “Design Fundamentals” section was omitted, consisting of some visual examples, all diagrams of colour, and the “How to soft proof for colour contrast” subsection. The latter was deemed “how-to” information likely subject to change over time.
- 15% of the “Typography” section was omitted, consisting of a few visual examples and the “how people read with eyesight” subsection.
- 100% of the “Digital Media > Practice of Web Accessibility” section was omitted, (~13 pages) as virtually all of this content is present in the WCAG 2.1 which I believe all designers should read, a point made in both versions of the text. This resource is also listed again at the back of the book.
- 100% of the “Digital Media > Testing for Web Accessibility” section was omitted (~4 pages) because it was deemed “how to” and less important than the underlying principles of accessible web design.
- 100% of the “Digital Media > Office Documents” was omitted (~2 pages), because it was “how to”, and it could be replaced by the Accessibility of Office Documents and Office Project, a resource recommended at the back of the book.
- 100% of the “Digital Media > PDFs” was omitted (~5 pages), because it was “how to”, information likely to change over time, and it could be replaced with the document Creating accessible PDF documents with Adobe® InDesign® CS6, a resource recommended at the back of the book.
- 70% of the “Resources” content was omitted (~5 pages) by removing all the descriptions for each resource, and limiting the information for each resource to title, author, and URL.
Further to these differences in content, the Essentials edition has had a few visual elements either, moved, removed, or presented slightly differently.
What are the differences between the new books, and the old books?
The project started out as a simple edit, but eventually became a massive re-write. Any underlying content that was still accurate or relevant in the previous books was included in the Supersized edition. However, less than 1% of the actual writing in the old books was carried over to the new books, and none of the visual examples were retained. So the new book has over 99% new writing, 100% new visual examples. We called it AccessAbility 2, because it is less of an updated version, and more of a sequel. We did retain Context Creative’s excellent art direction from the previous books, although the design was completely re-done from scratch, and some changes were made to increase accessibility. Here’s how the books compare by word count, page count, and words per page.
2010 Original. ~9,000 words (32 pages @ 281 words per page).
2015 Web. ~7,500 words (32 pages @234 words per page).
2019 Essentials. ~14,000 (48 pages @292 words per page).
2019 Supersized. ~25,500 words (88 pages @ 290 words per page).
The Essentials edition has almost as much content as the original two books combined, while the Supersized edition has over one and a half times the content of the original two books combined.
So what’s next?
We’re exhausted, but we are not done.
Eric Forest, who was instrumental in research, fact-checking, and most importantly proof-reading the book, has volunteered to take on the task of designing the French version.
Beyond that, I hope to guide the further development of the book for the foreseeable future, with incremental updates to the Supersized version. Eventually I’d like to release version 2.1, with added content that we think designers will find useful. Edmund Li, who was instrumental in guiding the Environmental Graphic Design section, has already volunteered to work on extending that section with another few pages of content. Outside of that, we also want to gather feedback from readers to help guide the future development of the book. And that’s where you come in…
If you haven’t already, please go download the book, and use it however you see fit. Let me know how it personally works for you. Any feedback is genuinely appreciated, but I am particularly interested in the following.
- Is anything confusing or unclear to you?
- Do you have any questions about accessible design that the book doesn’t answer sufficiently?
- What would make the book even more useful to you?
- Is there anything missing that you think is important for the audience to know?
Please, please, please also let me know if you discover any errors! Despite our best efforts, we are only human, and somewhere there’s bound to be a typo hidden away in plain sight. You can email me with any feedback at .
Thank-you for taking the time to read this. I’m immensely proud of the project, and grateful to have had such lovely people to work with. The book has a thorough credits section at the back, but I want to take this opportunity to highlight the contributions of two people in particular.
This book was severely delayed because of personal disability related health issues. During this time period, Hilary Ashworth at the RGD was immensely patient and compassionate. When it seemed increasingly unlikely that I would ever be able to return to work on the book, Jutta Treviranus at OCAD U gave me her endorsement to work on the project in lieu of other commitments. Thank-you both for your trust and support.
Lastly, thank-you to everyone who worked on the original two AccessAbility books. You are the catalyst.
cheers,
-Adam
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