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.