Iconography

The design and systematic use of visual symbols to convey meaning in an interface. Good iconography balances recognisability, consistency, and cultural appropriateness so that users can interpret symbols quickly without reading text. For accessibility, icons alone are rarely sufficient: they should be paired with accessible names, text labels, or colour coding to support users with cognitive, language, or low-vision needs, and to handle cases where icons are ambiguous (for example, distinguishing a bird chirping from a duck). Iconography also plays a major role in sound visualisation for Deaf and Hard of Hearing users, where icons represent the identity of environmental sounds.