A common refrain comes up often in the accessibility field. "Use semantic HTML," people say.| The A11Y Project
Can automated tools guarantee full compliance with accessibility standards like WCAG? The short answer is no. While automated accessibility tools are often marketed as comprehensive solutions, they are only part of the equation.| The A11Y Project
ARIA Landmark Roles can be helpful to assistive device users, as they can be used to orient a user to, and easily navigate, your website or application. For a quick video demonstration, check out "How ARIA landmark roles help screen reader users", by Léonie Watson.| The A11Y Project
Using the viewport meta tag the wrong way can prevent people with low vision concerns from accessing your website or web app.| The A11Y Project
Removing outlines in CSS creates issues for people navigating the web with a keyboard.| The A11Y Project
Developers commonly use display: none to hide content on the page. Unfortunately, this common action can be problematic for people who use screen readers, especially if the hidden content was meant to be for them to discover...| The A11Y Project
Your Vestibular system is the sensory mechanism in the inner ear that detects movement of the head and helps to control balance.| The A11Y Project
Use skip nav links in conjunction with a coherent heading outline and ARIA landmarks. You may need to also implement a JavaScript polyfill for Webkit-based browsers.| The A11Y Project
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), is a specification from the W3C and created to improve accessibility of applications by providing extra information to assistive technologies, such as screen readers, via attributes which could be added to HTML.| The A11Y Project
If you're unfamiliar with the term "numeronym", you may not have realized that a11y isn't just a hash tag, nor is it a hip way to spell ally. Rather a11y is a shorthand for accessibility.| The A11Y Project
A touch target is the total area a person can click or tap on to activate an interactive element such as a link, input, or button.| The A11Y Project
Most computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and web browsers have specialized tools to help people read and take action on the content they display. Some of these tools are display modes, which are pre-defined visual configurations you can tell your device to use.| The A11Y Project
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) is an extension of HTML. It is a technology that adds roles, states, and properties that are designed to help with the accessibility of websites and web apps.| The A11Y Project
A common opinion is that accessibility is expensive, and that if you think accessibility is expensive, you can deal with it later.| The A11Y Project
Accessibility is often viewed as making your site work on screen readers. In reality, web accessibility is a subset of User Experience (UX) focused on making your websites usable by the widest range of people possible, including those who have disabilities.| The A11Y Project
Testing your site for keyboard navigation will help ensure that keyboard users can access your site.| The A11Y Project
The alt attribute is meant to provide "alternate text" descriptions of images to help ensure people do not miss out on information conveyed by graphics.| The A11Y Project
VoiceOver is the assistive software built into macOS. It provides a richer set of keyboard shortcuts for navigating a website and reads sections of the page aloud based on the current focus. It’s a great way to test the accessibility of a project because it’s always readily at-hand: you can toggle VoiceOver on/off by:| The A11Y Project
Not auto-playing your media will make everyone happy.| The A11Y Project
Having good contrast and readability are an important part of creating an accessible website.| The A11Y Project
Your future self, coworkers, and most importantly customers and clients will thank you for developing with accessibility in mind.| The A11Y Project
Visual impairment is a condition that limits the visual capability of an individual to such a degree that additional support is needed.| The A11Y Project
People with cognitive disabilities often struggle with reading text on the Internet. When writing content, it is important to identify your target audience and write accordingly.| The A11Y Project
Never use role="application" on a widely containing element such as <body> if your page consists mostly of traditional widgets or page elements such as links that the user does not have to interact with in focus mode.| The A11Y Project
A common misconception among web developers is that screen readers only read the non-JavaScript page. Due to this misconception, we sometimes assume it's unnecessary to make JavaScript apps and other functionality accessible. This is categorically false.| The A11Y Project
Short answer: Don't use them, except in special circumstances.| The A11Y Project
One of the great things about the internet is the ability to share video.| The A11Y Project
In color theory, contrasting colors, also known as complementary colors, are colors from opposing segments of the color wheel. Colors that are directly across from one another on a basic color wheel provide maximum contrast.| The A11Y Project
NVDA is a free and open source screen reader from NVAccess. It is available for the Windows operating system and officially supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome web browsers. There is also a ton of braille display support!| The A11Y Project
Don't replace a label with a placeholder attribute. If labels are visually hidden, confirm that placeholders have sufficient contrast.| The A11Y Project
The semantic purpose of a data table is to present tabular data. Sighted users can quickly scan the table but a screen reader goes through line by line. Proper markup must be added to help the screen reader make the correct associations that a sighted user would.| The A11Y Project
Color blindness is a common genetic condition in which some peoples' eyes can't tell the difference between certain colors. That's not to say these people see the world in greyscale— just that many colors seem identical to one another. Total color blindness is very rare in humans.| The A11Y Project
In order to allow for full keyboard navigation of all focusable interactive elements in macOS Safari and Firefox, you'll need to make sure the following keyboard settings are adjusted.| The A11Y Project
ARIA 1.1 defines multiple "properties" that can be applied to elements. Unlike ARIA states, most properties are likely to stay static when a page is loaded instead of changing with user interaction.| The A11Y Project
ARIA 1.1 defines multiple "states" that can be applied to elements. States are likely to change as the user interacts with the page.| The A11Y Project
Resize text and make sure everything on the page works. Repeat until you get to 200% zoom. Seems simple? It is.| The A11Y Project
The anchor element is often cited as the main building block of the World Wide Web. It is used to create a link to other pages, to anchors within the same page, to other resources (such as a PDF) or to an email address. How can we make sure they are accessible to everyone?| The A11Y Project
Keyboard shortcuts are often presented to us in a list or a table. Lists and tables are great for some people, while others may be overwhelmed from the sheer number of commands to learn. Sometimes a more visual approach could help some people learn these commands.| The A11Y Project
The ARIA specification is divided into categories of attributes, one of which is Roles, and the other being States & Properties. ARIA roles, which are covered in this article, are generally used to describe elements:| The A11Y Project
With the world becoming data reliant, it's no surprise how data is the new gold. With the right data, you can improve peoples' lives, find solutions to problems and so on. There are many ways to capture peoples' data but on the web, forms are your go-to solution.| The A11Y Project
The advent of the web brought infinite possibilities. It changed the way we learn, work and socialize because we were no longer limited by real or imagined borders. However there was a problem: Lack of standard guidelines and proper structure. Due to the divergence of individual initiatives the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was created.| The A11Y Project
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).| The A11Y Project
Wouldn’t it be great if designers and developers tested their digital experiences for keyboard accessibility on the regular? And by extension, screen reader accessibility? That’s where the #NoMouse challenge and No Mouse Days come in.| The A11Y Project
VoiceOver is a screen-reading tool built into Apple Inc.'s iOS. It helps people navigate and use their iPhone without needing to see the screen. First introduced in 2009 with the iPod Shuffle and iPhone 3GS, VoiceOver has been in the picture in every Apple's iOS release ever since.| The A11Y Project
Animation is used in digital products in many ways, such as drawing a user’s focus to a particular area on the screen, providing another layer to a brand’s style with unique and ownable motion design, and adding a spark of unexpected fun to an otherwise robotic interaction.| The A11Y Project
tabindex is a global attribute that allows an HTML element to receive focus. It needs a value of zero or a negative number in order to work in an accessible way.| The A11Y Project
When you're designing for mobile, it's important to remember that some people will need to change the size of the content to read it easily.| The A11Y Project
Dyslexia is a Phonological Processing disorder. This means it is an issue with language processing, not vision.| The A11Y Project
Due to their technical, social, and moral issues, The A11Y Project does not recommend using permanent overlay plugins. We view these kinds of products as actively harmful, and a step backwards for digital accessibility efforts.| The A11Y Project
Alternate (alt) text help people who use assistive technology understand images, and are a core part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They require a human’s input to be effective.| The A11Y Project
Insufficient text contrast is the most common accessibility issue on websites today. According to the WebAIM Million report for 2021, 86.4% of home pages world wide have low contrast text. What's worse, this number has been increasing the past three years.| The A11Y Project
Even with the best of intentions, you may be making decisions that exclude disabled users. Below are practical, intentional steps you can start today to create and share more accessible social media, digital, and multimedia content.| The A11Y Project
Search engine optimization and accessibility have a lot more in common than you would think.| The A11Y Project
I'm a big believer in shifting left: considering accessibility as early in the process as we can. One way we can do this is by reviewing designs for accessibility. This helps us catch anything we've missed before we start developing it.| The A11Y Project
Designing with accessibility in mind from the start is even better than reviewing a design for accessibility. It helps us consider the wide range of people who use our products and services.| The A11Y Project
Introduction to Orca| The A11Y Project
Colorblindness is any visual anomaly where someone has an altered perception of colors. It can be total or partial. The A11Y Project already has an article that exhaustively covers the different types of color blindness while also providing tools that you can use during your design phases.| The A11Y Project
“I mean, she called you deaf, you’re hearing impaired!”| The A11Y Project
Headings are the backbone of the content of a page. A visitor should be able to scan the webpage using headings to get a good impression of its content.| The A11Y Project
Firefox has become one of the best tools for accessibility audits. Let’s go over Firefox’s accessibility features that you can use today.| The A11Y Project
The Web Accessibility Initiative is W3C's effort to improve accessibility of the Web for people with disabilities.| The A11Y Project
Visual data representation is being used more and more in digital newsrooms across the world. The downside, however, is how exclusionary this can be for people with visual impairments.| The A11Y Project
There are many benefits to writing alt text for images, especially from accessibility and legal standpoints.| The A11Y Project
Introduction to TalkBack| The A11Y Project
This article was written by ChatGPT with the below prompt written by Jamie Vanderwall.| The A11Y Project