Resources

Toronto Parks and Trails Wayfinding

The Toronto Parks and Trails Wayfinding system was developed to improve accessibility and facilitate exploration across the city’s extensive network of parks and multi-use trails. The project created a consistent, city-wide wayfinding system that supports visitors in finding destinations, understanding trail conditions, and moving seamlessly between parkland and urban environments.

Building an Accessible Digital Workplace

2toLead partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in Toronto to design an inclusive intranet and build awareness and skills around accessible content creation.

TRIUMF website

TRIUMF.ca was redesigned to improve accessibility and simplify complex scientific content for diverse users. The site features clear navigation, plain language and a balanced visual design with strong contrast and readability.

Design and Disability: 10 Tales Of Accessible Design

V & A Publishing, 2025

This visually rich book celebrates design ingenuity, acknowledging the significant contributions of disabled individuals and communities to design and making the point that, simply put, inclusive design is better for all. Covering ten projects across fields including fashion, community practices, social media, graphic design, gaming and architecture, Design and Disability delves into the motivations and methods of their creators. It poses questions that are central to their design, such as how to balance diverse access needs, what does radical visibility mean and what makes a community. Design and Disability offers a manifesto for living now and into the future. It addresses an urgent gap in the literature and is led by disabled communities, emphasizing the importance of recognizing disabled individuals as experts in their own experiences.

Access Ability 2: A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design

Adam Rallo RGD, Eric Forest RGD, James Kuo RGD, Randal Boutilier RGD, Edmund Li RGD

Revised + Supersized Second Edition. This book is meant for anyone involved in the process of designing communication materials. This is a broad group of individuals, including professional graphic designers, clients, educators, students, and many others. Some of you are accessibility experts. Some of you have never even heard of the term accessible design until now.

A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experience

Sarah Horton & Whitney Quesenbery. Rosenfeld Media, 2013.

This book gives an introductory overview to the process of accessible and inclusive web design. It has a very user-centric focus, with special considerations for the diverse range of people who may be considered outliers.

Make-It-Accessible

Launched in 2022, in many ways Make-It-Accessible served as the inspiration for RGD’s AccessAbility website. Design studio, Manoverboard, designed and built it because we wanted to create an accessibility resource websites that took the fundamentals of visual design — typography, illustration, colour and whitespace — seriously, while also adhering to WCAG guidelines and standards. Our theory was this: making a website accessible and beautiful is within reach. Make-It-Accessible presents content that is relevant to digital design for four distinct audiences: studio and agency owners, designers, writers and developers. It offers resources and ideas based on many years of experiences as a studio. And it offers a user-friendly means to arrive at and bookmark relevant content. The site received funding by the Manitoba Accessibility Fund through the Manitoba Government.

Diverse Abilities and Barriers

W3C’s Diverse Abilities and Barriers page describes a wide range of disabilities and the barriers each experience when they encounter inaccessible websites and apps.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

This site acts as a hub for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3c)’s extensive accessibility initiatives, strategies, standards, and resources.

Accessible Colour Palette Builder

This palette builder creates a quick grid that tells you what combinations will meet or fail 4.5:1 contrast ratio.

Colour Accessibility Testing Tool

Colour accessibility tool including different colour blindness and vision comparisons.

Web Accessibility Testing Tools

Webinar provided by Vision Australia on accessibility testing tools and methods for web. Provides a good introduction on the mindset and approaches you should use when accessibility testing a website.

Building Brands Optimized for Accessibility by Sabrina Young RGD

In the talk, Sabrina will share details to help you automate the tedious, optimize accessibility and improve brand consistency, throughout your document designs, while gaining more time for your creative process.

Common Accessibility Issues and How to Fix Them

Would you like to learn more about the most common design-related accessibility problems and how to fix them? During the webinar, we will look at design examples with accessibility issues related to the usage of colour, colour contrast, keyboard functionality and more. We will see what groups of users are affected by these problems and how to resolve them. We will also talk about accessibility annotations and how they can help to reduce developer decision-making efforts.

From InDesign to Acrobat: A practical guide to accessible PDF workflows

Accessibility is not just a technical requirement—it’s a design responsibility. In this session, Eric will walk us through a real-world workflow from InDesign to Acrobat that supports accessible document creation. Through tagging, reading order and metadata, we explore how to ensure digital documents are usable by all. Eric brings a practical, designer-first approach to accessibility, offering tools and insights that help embed inclusive practices into everyday design workflows.