UNICEF Canada

Overview

UNICEF is the world’s farthest-reaching humanitarian organization for children. Across 190 countries and territories, and in the world’s toughest places, UNICEF works day in and day out to help children survive. To defend their rights. To keep them protected, healthy and educated. To give them a fair chance to fulfil their potential.

UNICEF Canada wanted to remediate the published documents on their website. This included their Annual Reports, pledge forms, financial statements, etc. Their team selected Cantan Group to help them ensure that their documents were accessible and comply with accessibility legislation and guidelines.

An Aim Toward Accessibility

The team at UNICEF were required to update their PDF documents—including annual reports, and financial statements—to be accessible as per AODA requirements. This spanned over 30+ documents (650+ pages).

This presented a challenge as many of the original documents were not available, so we were tasked with recreating them from scratch including tables, charts, icons, and graphical elements. Other legacy documents were not created with accessibility in mind, and required significant remediation.

Documents needed to be accessible and consistent with the UNICEF branding—this was at the forefront when updating the documents. UNICEF’s primary cyan brand colour, which had been used throughout the original documents in an inaccessible manner. Therefore, we created different techniques to work around this, while also ensuring the brand colour was incorporated in the documents to maintain the desired brand recognition. Our team also helped educate the staff on how to develop accessible documents.

We worked over the course of months to update the documents and iterated on design elements until the marketing team was satisfied with the outcome.