Foundations posts

This post provides an overview of common assistive technologies (AT) used by people with seeing, hearing, moving, and thinking disabilities. It also explains what adaptive strategies are, and how these approaches work together to support accessibility and inclusive experiences.

By prioritising semantic HTML and offering keyboard-friendly alternatives for complex interactions, you help create a more inclusive experience for people who use a keyboard.

In this post, we explore how to use the <fieldset> and <legend> elements to group and label form elements effectively, creating a more accessible and well-structured experience.

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.

As well as labelling text fields with input and labels, and grouping forms with the <fieldset> and <legend> elements, form validation and error messages are also essential to making forms accessible to everyone.

In this post about forms, we explore how to effectively label text fields using <input> and <label> elements to create form inputs that are both accessible and user-friendly.

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.

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.

In this post we explore assigning accessible names and descriptions using HTML and WAI-ARIA.

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.

This post introduces the different forms of pointer gestures and covers how and when to provide alternatives for people who can't perform them.

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).

In this post we explore what WAI-ARIA is, and how it can enhance the user experience for people using screen readers.

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.

For people who only use a keyboard to navigate the web, visible focus styles may be one of the few ways to understand where they are in a page and what it is that they are interacting with.

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.

This post explores how to create usable, consistent, and well-spaced target sizes.

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.

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.

In this post we explore what HTML semantics are, and how they're experienced by people using assistive technologies like screen readers and speech recognition software.

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.

Most websites have common areas of content like a header and footer, a main content area, and one or more navigation blocks. Sighted people can identify these areas based on the way they're styled and the content they contain, but people who are blind cannot do that quite as efficiently. Landmarks, like headings and lists, offer screen reader users a more comparable experience for identifying and navigating between different areas of content.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.