Foundations posts

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.