Why Accessible Brands Become the Obvious Choice

A brand made for everyone ends up belonging to no one, so every brand I build starts with a specific audience. But inside that audience there are always people who see colors differently, read differently or simply see less, and if the brand only works for typical eyesight, the business loses part of the audience it worked so hard to define.

Your audience already includes them

When I define a target audience with a client, it’s never “women 40 to 50” or “men 20 to 40”, because people don’t choose brands by age. An audience is people who share values, a standard of living and the same barriers, and among them there are always people with visual impairments.

About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have red-green color blindness, so in an audience of 25 men, about two may see your red sale badge and your green “in stock” label as almost the same color. Dyslexia is often estimated at around 1 in 10 people, although the figure varies a lot depending on how it’s measured. And more than 1 in 4 American adults reported a disability in 2022, rising to 43.9% among people 65 and older, so if your customers are older, this is a large part of your audience.

These aren’t new customers you’d have to win over, they’re the same people you described in your positioning.

Accessibility doesn’t widen your audience, it stops you losing part of it.

Why an automatic fix can break your brand

The two most common types of color blindness work very differently. People with red-green color blindness, by far the most common type, see the world mostly in shades of blue and yellow, so greens can look beige and reds can look brownish. People with blue-yellow color blindness, which is much rarer, see mostly reds, pinks and teals, so blue can look green and yellow can look violet or gray.

Say a law firm uses green as its main brand color. If the website switches on an automated tool that replaces every green with whatever the person can see, the greens might turn pink, and suddenly a calm, trustworthy legal brand looks like a beauty salon. The site is technically adapted for people with color blindness, but it no longer feels like the same company, so the brand loses the consistency and the impression it was built to create.

That’s why I don’t leave this to automation. I design an extra palette for each type that stays as close to the brand’s character as possible, for this law firm one built on the green-blue shades the person can still tell apart.

How I adapt a brand system for different eyes

I use the website as the main example, because it’s where most people find information, order a service, buy a product or ask a question, so it’s the channel where a brand that can’t be read costs the most.

I build the core brand system first, the logo and its variations, the color palette and the typefaces, because the adapted versions have to follow the same logic as the original.
Then I adapt the palette for the two most common types of color blindness, choosing from the colors each group can tell apart and arranging them with the same structure as the main palette, so the brand still feels like itself.
I add view modes to the website, so a visitor can raise the contrast if they struggle to tell similar shades apart, enlarge the text if it’s too small for them, or increase the line spacing if that makes the site easier to read and navigate.
I always add a dyslexia mode, which switches to typefaces designed for easier reading. They’re less attractive than the brand fonts, but in this mode that doesn’t matter, because the job is to get across the message the brand strategy was built around.
I create a page that explains the modes, with a feedback form, because I can’t predict every need in advance, and a visitor who tells you what’s still hard to use is helping you improve, not criticizing you.

Each business can have its own set of modes, depending on its audience. You can see how it works on my own website: the accessibility icon lets you choose the view that’s most comfortable for your eyes.

When a visitor can adapt the site to their needs, the brand shows it understands the people it serves, which is what makes it a responsible brand in practice rather than in a mission statement.

Why most websites still get this wrong

In 2026, 95.9% of the top million home pages had accessibility failures, and the most common one, found on 83.9% of them, was text without enough contrast to read comfortably. Contrast is decided when someone picks light gray for body text or white type on a pale brand color, and the same goes for justified paragraphs, long headlines in capitals and tight spacing, so most of these problems start in the brand guidelines long before a developer builds the site.

Brands are usually designed around the eyes of the people who make them. Facebook is the well-known case: its founder is red-green color blind and has said blue is the color he sees best, which is why the brand is blue. That worked for him, and when the designer’s vision matches the customer’s, nobody notices, but every customer who sees differently gets a brand that’s harder to use.

Free checkers help, and I use them, because six basic errors make up about 96% of what automated scans find. What a checker or a one-click widget can’t do is choose your colors and fonts for you, which is why in 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe, one of the best-known widget makers, $1 million for claiming its tool could make any website compliant.

A widget can’t fix what the brand got wrong.

What it costs to leave people out

In one UK survey from 2019, 69% of disabled online shoppers said they leave websites that are hard to use, and only 8% ever told the business. So you won’t hear about the customers you lose, you’ll just see weaker sales and probably blame the price or the ads. The same survey found that 86% would spend more on sites with fewer barriers.

There’s also a legal side. More than 5,000 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2025, mostly against online stores, and they include small Shopify and WordPress sites, not only big retailers. If you sell to customers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act has covered online stores since June 2025, unless you’re a service business with fewer than 10 people and up to €2 million in turnover.

What I’d check first

The grayscale test. Look at your logo, homepage and packaging in black and white, and if you can’t tell what’s a button, what’s on sale or which product is which, color is doing a job it can’t do alone.

The contrast check. Put your text and background colors into a free contrast checker, and if body text or buttons fail, start there, because it affects almost every visitor.

The paragraph test. Open a long page of your site on your phone, and if the text is justified, set in capitals or packed into tight lines, it’s harder for dyslexic readers and tiring for everyone else.

Positioning decides who your brand is for, and accessibility makes sure all of those people can actually see, read and use it.

If you’re building or refreshing your brand and want it to work for everyone in your audience, let’s talk, I’d love to hear about your business.