Brand Accessibility: How to Gain True Trust & Loyalty

Four examples of accessibility: neurodivergent-friendly website on desktop, high-contrast signage at grocery store, legible decoration at in-person event and an app on a smart phone.

What is Accessibility?

When people hear the word accessibility, they usually think about websites or buildings — ramps, captions, alt text and cross-walks. While these tools are essential, they only address accessibility in finite interaction points of a customer journey and are only a part of what can be measured through a customer's journey.

Brand accessibility starts much earlier, affects every interaction point and can be easily measured.

It lives inside your colors, typography, tone of voice, visual style, and every piece of communication your team puts into the world.

Accessibility isn’t just about functional usability. It’s about making your brand clear, perceivable, inclusive, and trustworthy for every person who encounters it.

Brand accessibility can use accessibility standards like WCAG but can go further by asking questions like:

• Can viewers actually read your social posts and signage?

• Can audiences process your tone, your visuals, and your layouts?

• Do they see themselves represented in your media and storytelling?

• Are you designing experiences that welcome — not overwhelm?
  

These are brand concerns. And they are influenced entirely by the decisions made by your brand, marketing, and design teams.

Alt Text Example: AI generated silhouettes of an imaginary scene where a young business woman who is blind walks in a dark suit, sunglasses and short hair with her labrador guide dog past a branded table with sample products at a business conference event. Her middle aged co-worker with short curly white hair walks beside her.

What Is Brand Accessibility?

Brand accessibility is the practice of designing your brand so that it can be understood and experienced by as many people as possible. This includes people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities — and also people experiencing cognitive load, sensory overwhelm, low bandwidth, multilingual processing, or everyday fatigue.

It shows up in:

• how legible your colors and type are

• how clear and direct your messaging feels

• how inclusive your visuals and media are

• how easily someone can navigate your brand touchpoints

If web accessibility and event accessibility are the leaves of the ethical design tree, then brand accessibility is the branchwork — the structure that supports every interaction and forms the foundation of how people perceive your brand.

Brand guide and website of Tech Atypically, a coaching service for neurodivergent professionals navigating their tech career, their way. Brand guide gives accessibility and AI instructions.

When your brand identity isn’t accessible, your audience notices long before they reach your website. And those moments quickly shape how they interpret your brand’s intentions, care, and credibility.

Your brand identity either reinforces inclusion or undermines it.

Why Brand Accessibility Impacts Trust and Loyalty

Your audience doesn’t separate your brand’s visuals from your values. If your messaging is hard to process or your visuals exclude people, they experience that as a sign of inconsistency — or even indifference.

Data supports this:

• Inclusive advertising increases first-choice preference by 62% (Unstereotype Alliance)

• Customer loyalty rises by 15% when people feel represented and considered (CSG)

• 75% of consumers say a brand’s inclusion practices influence their buying decisions (Kantar)

Brand accessibility isn’t about aesthetics. It's about brand trust, brand loyalty, and brand relevance.

Every inaccessible design choice creates friction and barriers to purchase:

• Overly complex language in a mission statement that alienates readers before you’ve even made your case.

• Low-contrast text on a print flyer that strains the eyes of low-vision users.

• Stylized typography in your logo that loses legibility at small sizes or on mobile screens.

• Motion-heavy ads that overwhelm neurodiverse viewers.

• Complex Images posted on social media without alt-text so screen readers can’t interpret them.

• Color-only data visualizations that exclude those with color blindness.
  

Each of these choices tells a silent story about who was, or wasn’t, considered in the design process. These oversights don’t just exclude; they erode trust.

A brand can’t claim to be inclusive if its communications unintentionally say, “You weren’t considered.” Accessibility removes that friction. It transforms your materials from performance to practice — from looking inclusive to being inclusive.

Hidden Barriers Inside Brand Identity

Some of the biggest accessibility issues happen far upstream — inside the brand identity system itself.

These barriers often show up quietly in:

• Low-contrast color palettes that look stylish but become unreadable in real use

• Overly stylized fonts that disappear on mobile or small packaging

• Busy layouts that create cognitive overwhelm

• Tone of voice that is clever, complex, or inconsiderate of neurodivergent readers

• Images that only reflect a narrow demographic

• Social graphics posted without alt text or descriptive captions

• Data visualizations relying on color alone

• Motion-heavy campaigns that overstimulate attention-sensitive audiences
  

Individually these seem small.

Together, they send a message:“You weren’t considered.”

Brand accessibility protects your intention from being overshadowed by unintentional exclusion.

From Brand Awareness to Brand Accountability

Brand awareness gets you seen. Brand accountability earns you trust.

Purpose-driven companies often talk about inclusion — but real accountability begins when a brand is willing to:

• adjust colors for better readability

• refine typography for clarity

• simplify tone for comprehension

• expand imagery for representation

• design layouts that reduce cognitive load

• build systems that consider diverse abilities

When your values and visuals align, people feel it immediately.When they don’t, the disconnect is obvious.

The 6 Lenses of Accessible Branding

Brand Accessibility is the proof point between what your company says and what your audience experiences. It's not a promise for the future. It’s the price of credibility now. Any business has the ability to assess, measure and improve it.

While there isn’t yet a national or international brand accessibility standard (the way WCAG is for web accessibility), there are six core categories of your brand identity that can be evaluated:

1. Tone of Voice — Build trust through consistency and clarity on all branded language.

2. Logo — Bring clear recognition and memorability to all symbols and company names.

3. Color — Improve legibility and reduce eye strain with high contrast no matter static or moving.

4. Font — Legible, consistent, and variable sizes can prioritize clarity over decoration.

5. Media — Tell static and moving stories that include and reflect your audiences’ reality.

6. UX — Reduce barriers to entry and purchase in branded digital and physical experiences.

Source: The Sage Mages 6 Lens Framework Model

Together, these six lenses turn accessibility from an afterthought into an impactful operational value — one that can be seen, heard, and felt by diverse audiences.

Brand Accessibility Is a Shared Responsibility

Accessibility is not owned by one department. The Sage Mages brand studio believes it's a shared responsibility that connects leadership, marketing, design, and operations under one question: Who's preference are we avoiding?

Every person involved in shaping a brand, from the designer to the CEO, has the power to make participation easier or harder for someone else.

Accessibility is not charity or constraint. It's how respect shows up in design. If your brand claims to care about people, accessibility is how you prove it — clearly, consistently, and without exception.

Three Practical Steps to Start Today

1. Take inventory of your brand identity. Start by looking at what already exists. Review the consistency of your colors, fonts, and media across your website, social media, email, and print design. Notice where things feel hard to read, visually noisy, or simply “off.” You’re not judging or fixing everything today—you’re just getting an honest picture of how your brand is currently showing up.
   

2. Reveal customer & employee feedback. Next, take a fresh look at the feedback you’re already getting. This could be comments from customers, questions from your team, reviews, or internal observations. Use the six Lens categories—tone, logo, color, fonts, media, and UX—as a way to interpret that feedback. Ask yourself where the pain points might be coming from. Was someone confused because the language was unclear? Did they miss important information because the text was too small or low contrast? Did they feel unseen because the imagery didn’t reflect their reality? Many engagement or communication problems are actually brand accessibility issues in disguise.
   

3. Find an everyday accessible tool to implement. Choose one simple accessibility tool you can start using regularly. It doesn’t have to require a big budget or a complicated system. A free color contrast checker, for example, can tell you in an instant whether your text and background colors pass or fail WCAG contrast standards. Using a tool like this as part of your everyday design process helps you make small, steady improvements that add up across all your brand touchpoints. When accessibility becomes a quiet, normal part of how you design—not a one-time project—your brand moves from inclusive intentions to inclusive impact.

Ready to implement more without the overwhelm? Check out The Sage Mages’ Brand Accessibility Cheat Sheet — your first step toward making accessibility a measurable part of your brand’s communication system.