OXD Identity, Website and Collateral

Summary

OXD’s materials prioritize inclusivity and accessibility by using plain language, diverse visuals and WCAG AA-compliant design.

Context

The OXD brand supports inclusivity and accessibility at its core. Our website and brand materials strive to use inclusive and plain language across all channels.

We also use WCAG AA compliant colour combinations and avoid using colour solely to represent information. Using our Diversity Palette, our illustrations represent different skin tones, genders, ages, abilities, and cultural backgrounds. We also use photos of our own diverse staff to represent the culture at OXD.

The content we write covers diverse topics and social themes that are valuable to our community.

Our website uses industry best practices for coding and testing to support sensory and cognitive considerations. Our content uses organizational methods to simplify complex content including chunking and hierarchy.

Design process

During design and development, we build accessibility checks into every stage of the process. Our designers create specifications based on AA standards (for example, not relying on colour alone to indicate functionality or communicate information), our developers build our site to accommodate accessibility needs, and our QA testers follow rigorous accessibility criteria when evaluating the final products.

But accessibility is never “done”. Our process to maximize accessibility and inclusive materials begins during design and development, but continues long after launch. We strive to provide our staff and all users of the brand with the tools they need to create accessible communications, including training, access to editorial guidelines available on our intranet, and dozens of templates for creating ready-to-go presentations and documents. We also provide easy reference to AA-compliant pairings of the hues in our brand colour palette.

Solution

NVDA screen reader software
Wave, Lighthouse, Accessibility Insights for Web, IBM Equal
Access Accessibility Checker (Chrome extensions)
VoiceOver, Mac-specific screen reader software
SortSite code testing software
BrowserStack live web-based mobile testing platform

Illustration of five women for International Women's Day.

Illustration of varies people representing different ethnicities.

Typeface Source Serif and Source Sans selected for the project.

Does the project reflect the principles of diversity and inclusion? If so, explain.

At OXD, our staff represents a diverse range of people, and we work with a diverse community, so it was important to reflect that in our own brand.