Starting material for Accessibility
Accessibility starter • Guide
@September 5, 2022
Links and references if you are just starting to learn about accessibility
Accessibility as a usability amplifier
By using a permanent disability as our baseline more people benefit. Making accessibility a core aspect of design and development decision-making ensures products are usable for anyone, with or without a disability.
As an example, Microsoft Inclusive design has an example where designing for users with one arm (a permeant disability) scales to include 21 million people:
Limitation | More people benefiting | |
Permanent | One arm | 26k |
Temporary | Arm Injury with a broken arm | 13m |
Situational | New parent carrying their baby in one arm | 8m |
Totals: | 21m+ | |
Source: United States Census Bureau, Limbs for Life Foundation, Amputee Coalition, MedicineHealth.com, CDC.gov, Disability Statistics Center at the UCSF
Digital accessibility encompasses all impairments
Accessibility is a spectrum of permanent, temporary and situational scenarios that when ignored introduce barriers to a person's ability to access digital content
Disability types
- Touch: for physical impairments
- See: for vision loss
- Hear: for hearing loss
- Speak: for non-verbal impairments
Starter material: Designing for accessibility
Description | Link to material |
Posters showing High-level design considerations for accessible needs | |
LinkedIn Learning course by Derek Featherstone that introduces accessibility and the barriers people face | |
LinkedIn Learning course by Derek Featherstone with practical accessibility techniques to ensure your web designs can be viewed and used by everyone | |
Basic design job sheet from Deque to use when designing to remember accessibility basics |
Starter material: Screen readers
Description | Link to material |
An 8-bit style animation video to learn how someone using a screen reader may use landmarks, headings and tab stops to navigate a web page | |
Accessibility fundamentals in short videos from a Google Chrome developer | |
Screen reader keyboard shortcuts and how to use summary from Deque University | |
Detailed examples and explanations for what ARIA landmarks are |
Starter material: Vision lost
Empathise with vision impairments with these handy tools
Description | Link to material |
Vision loss glasses to simulate general loss of the ability to see fine detail | |
Colour contrast checkers to compare ratios between colours | |
A tool that shows WCAG contrast ratios by colour vision types |
Starter material: Thinkning
Information about cognitive impairments that affect the ability to think and problem solve
Description | Link to material |
Deque article that's a really good introduction to what “Cognitive” disabilities actually mean |