Digital Accessibility
Making the Visual Experience of Typography Accessible Beyond Sight
Duration
4 weeks
Apr 2025 - May 2025
My Role
Digital Accessibility & UX Design Consultant
Team
Gloria Yang (Me), Lan-Ting Ko, Smridhi Gupta, Simran Kaur, Nandita Malhotra
Designing Beyond Sight: Making Typography Accessible Through Sound
Created in collaboration with the Cooper Hewitt Museum, this project reimagines the Bungee web-based font tester to be more inclusive and accessible. The goal was to ensure users who rely on auditory and screen reader feedback could meaningfully experience Bungee’s bold and playful design. By transforming visual expression into multi-sensory interaction, the project supports Cooper Hewitt’s mission to deliver a more equitable digital experience for all audiences.
Typography is inherently visual, yet not everyone experiences it that way. The Bungee typeface, known for its layered colors, dimensional forms, and neon-inspired personality, presents a unique accessibility challenge: how can a design built on visual vibrancy be understood without sight?
People who depend on screen readers or auditory cues often encounter interfaces that describe only structure, not feeling or form. Without alternative sensory pathways, the expressive qualities of a typeface — its rhythm, energy, and spatial depth — remain inaccessible.
How might we translate the visual richness of the Bungee typeface into an equally expressive and meaningful experience for users who rely on sound rather than sight?
To bridge this sensory gap, we introduced:
Unfolded Control Panel
Simplified the interface by removing accordion-style toggles so all controls remain visible at once. This improved accessibility, enhanced visibility, and reduced interaction steps for both people with sight disability and people use screen readers.
Annotated Color Picker
Replaced the gradient-based color picker with a swatch-style palette labeled with descriptive text. This supports keyboard navigation and screen reader accessibility, ensuring color choices are perceivable by all users.
Guided Tutorial
Created a contextual onboarding flow that guides users step-by-step through the interface, available controls, and usage of the font tester, making it approachable and intuitive for first-time users.
Multi-Sensory Design
Introduced audio descriptions that translate visual traits like color, layering, and dimensional form into sound. This feature reimagines how rich, visual-heavy typography can be experienced through hearing as well as sight.
What is Bungee?
Bungee, created by David Jonathan Ross and collected by the Cooper Hewitt Museum, is a digital font that celebrates the vibrancy of city life. Its layered, stackable forms and playful dimensionality bring neon signage energy into typographic design.
Understanding the Accessibility Gap
Visual impairment is far more common than most realize.
Over 51.9 million Americans experience vision loss, and more than 307,000 are completely blind. Yet most digital tools still fail to translate visual richness into non-visual forms. For a font tester, a product built around form, rhythm, and color, that gap becomes especially striking.
To bridge this gap, we looked at how artists and designers reimagine sensory experience beyond sight:
Clarke Reynolds, a blind artist, transforms letters into tactile code, allowing people to feel the structure of language.
Shannon Lin paints using audio, explores how sound can become texture, shaping visual art through rhythm and resonance.
Dolby’s audio guides, developed by Bobby Goulder, demonstrate how sound can narrate and evoke artworks with clarity and emotion.
Jack Coulter, a synesthetic artist often described as “the painter who sees music in colour,” creates work directly inspired by sound, visualizing music as vibrant, expressive brushstrokes that blur the lines between what we hear and what we see.
These examples taught us that sound and touch aren’t substitutes for sight, they’re storytelling mediums of their own.
From our research, two insights emerged that shaped our design direction:
Audio can guide, describe, and emotionally connect users to visual content in meaningful ways.
When thoughtfully integrated, sound can evoke the mood, rhythm, and texture of visual work.
Meet Amina - Museum Educator from Chicago, IL
Amina represents museum professionals and educators who are passionate about making art and design accessible to everyone. She experiences the world primarily through sound and relies on assistive technologies like screen readers and audio tours to explore visual content. Amina seeks tools that translate visual experiences into rich auditory narratives, helping her engage with design work both personally and professionally.
🖼 32-year-old museum educator in Chicago, IL
💻 Devices: iPhone, AirPods, Laptop
♿️ Disability: Legally blind since birth
🦮 Assistive Technology (AT): VoiceOver, audio tours, screen reader
What Happen When Visual Richness Meets Barriers?
The Bungee Font Tester was designed for visual experimentation: layering, stacking, and color play. But for users like Amina, who navigate the world through sound and assistive technology, this experience became nearly inaccessible.
Our goal was to identify where the current design broke down and how it could evolve into something inclusive, intuitive, and expressive beyond sight.
What We Found as Challenges are ↓
Hidden Controls Limited Access
The accordion-style control panel required multiple clicks and wasn’t keyboard operable, blocking essential access for non-mouse users. Even sighted users found it unnecessarily complex.
Color Picker Depended on Vision
The gradient-based color picker lacked both keyboard navigation and non-visual descriptions, making color selection impossible for screen reader users.
Visual-Only Experience
The tester relied entirely on sight to convey form and emotion. While visual descriptions could help, they couldn’t fully capture Bungee’s lively, urban personality.
No Onboarding for New Users
Without guidance or contextual help, users were left unsure how to begin, especially those relying on screen readers.
Translating Insights into Design Solutions
With a clearer understanding of Amina’s needs, we reimagined Bungee’s tester through multi-sensory accessibility.
Demo #1: Guided Interaction & Simplified Interface
We simplified the interface by removing the accordion layout and making all controls, like font weight, color, and orientation, visible upfront.
To help first-time users, we introduced a guided tutorial that mirrors a screen reader’s navigation flow, explaining each section step-by-step for clarity and confidence.
Demo #2: Translating Sight into Sound
We developed an audio experience that lets users “hear” typography. When a user selects font characteristics, a “Play” button translates visual features into sound, like bold weights represented by deep bass tones or vertical stacking expressed through rising notes.
This bridges sight and sound, allowing users to feel the rhythm and mood of Bungee through another sense.
Why This Approach Matters?
We saw accessibility not as a checklist, but as a creative opportunity.
By bridging visual and auditory design, we:
Preserved Bungee’s artistic intent through sensory translation.
Delivered emotional richness for all users, regardless of how they perceive.
Built a repeatable framework for translating other visual-first typefaces into multi-sensory experiences.
What're Our Reflections?
This project wasn’t just about making Bungee accessible, it was about redefining what accessibility can mean. When inclusivity drives creativity, accessibility transforms from accommodation into innovation. Typography becomes not just something to see—but something to hear, feel, and experience.