Accessibility foundations

Posted on Monday, 18 March 2024 by Henny Swan in Design and development

Our foundations series provides an overview of core accessibility considerations.

They are a good starting point for visual designers, content designers, interaction designers, and developers when designing and building accessible products and services.

People

Types of disability

This post offers an overview of various disability types across four groups: seeing, hearing, moving, and thinking, and provides a brief exploration of what disability is, highlighting how permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities can affect us all.

Animations and images

Animations and flashing content

Animation and movement can add to the visual appeal of content, but poorly designed animations can cause problems for many people unless they are implemented correctly.

Text descriptions

Text descriptions are primary content, and when images do not have a text description, anyone who cannot see the image will not know its purpose. This means people may be unable to access content or perform related tasks.

Colour and style

Colour contrast

Good contrast is about using colours that provide enough variation between the content and background. This is particularly important for people who have conditions that affect vision or colour perception, as well as people browsing on mobile in different light conditions.

Colour and meaning

Colour is a valuable tool for communicating meaning. But if you can't see colour, then meaning is lost. Always plan to use colour to convey meaning in combination with another means of identification.

Visible focus styles

Visible focus styles help us to understand which part of a web page we're interacting with. You may have seen visible focus styles appear as an outline around a link or a button for example.

Interaction

Labelling text fields with input and label

We explore how to effectively label text fields using <input> and <label> elements to create form inputs that are both accessible and user-friendly.

Native versus custom components

Deciding whether to use native or custom components for a website or web application can have implications in terms of development effort, user experience, and accessibility. This post considers the pros and cons of each approach with a focus on accessibility, and provides guidance on how to choose one.

Pointer gestures

A pointer gesture is an action a person performs using their finger, mouse, or an assistive technology like a head pointer or eye gaze system to operate a functional control. Some pointer gestures can be difficult or even impossible for certain people to perform, so an accessible alternative may be required.

Session timeouts

Session timeouts are designed to protect privacy and security, but if they’re implemented incorrectly, they can prevent people from completing tasks on a website.

Target sizes

A target size is the area that can be activated in order to interact with an element. For people who have dexterity issues, the smaller a target size is, the more difficult it may be to use the website.

Structure and semantics

Accessible names and descriptions

An element's name, or accessible name, is how it's identified. An accessible description provides additional information, about the element, that complements the accessible name.

Headings

Well structured content helps everybody understand and navigate documents. When coded properly in the HTML, headings, lists, and landmarks help people who use screen readers (software that reads what’s on screen) both scan and navigate pages.

HTML semantics

HTML semantics provide accessibility information about page structure and an element's role, name, and state, helping to convey the nature and purpose of content on web pages.

Introduction to WAI-ARIA

The Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification 1.2, or WAI-ARIA or ARIA for short, is a technical specification written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Labelling text fields with input and label

We explore how to effectively label text fields using <input> and <label> elements to create form inputs that are both accessible and user-friendly.

Landmarks

Landmarks, like headings and lists, offer screen reader users a more comparable experience for identifying and navigating between different areas of content.

Lists

A list is generally agreed to be a series of words or phrases that are grouped together for a reason. That reason might be to remember the items we want from the store, to share our top five favourite movies, or to write down the steps needed to complete a task.

Next steps

For more information about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, read our WCAG primer or find out more about how our assessments can help you identify issues in your websites, mobile applications, design systems, and other products and services.