Intro

Design, illustration and accessibility work to create a brand new guide to working with women with intellectual disabilities

In 2021-22 we worked with WWILD, based in Brisbane, who created a podcast highlighting the experiences of women with intellectual learning disabilities – and how service providers could best work with them. This podcast was called “And You Think You’re The Expert?”

It’s a unique podcast and publication because WWILD asked the women with intellectual learning disabilities themselves, about what service providers could do to support them best. The women involved are talking from the position of experts, and are empowered to share valuable and possibly previously unknown insights into their lives and experiences.

Working closely with WWILD, we first created illustrations of all the experts who put their insights into the podcast. Each contributor showed us what they wanted to look like, which colours, styles, and even their favourite animals came into the portraits. The illustrated portraits are a way of expressing each expert’s personality anonymously.

We then created the booklet, which is full of quotes and takeaway tips for making services better serve women with intellectual learning disabilities – many of whom have gone through domestic or family violence situations. The booklet is open for all to read and share, and you can read it here.

After this we used the look and feel we’d developed through the illustrations and booklet to create a fun, expressive and literal logo of the podcast. Showing the experts talking, relaxing and contributing ideas and knowledge was important.

Creating the website to house the podcast, booklet and posters had an important element – making sure it was accessible to people who needed some help reading the text but did not necessarily have accessibility tools installed on their computers or device.

We were able to use and fine tune an open source solution with no ongoing fees (for this website’s amount of visitors), which both read out the text, and highlighted it as it went. This was rare to find, or not existing in pre-made accessibility solutions. We were proud of finding a solution that matched the needs of the women who were advising on their needs.

A sample of how it looks is below.