Resources

AbilityNet is a pioneering UK charity that help organisations of all types and sizes to become more inclusive and to build accessible digital products and service

References for accessibility that is simplified and not daunting or confusing

AccessibleEU is one of the flagship initiatives proposed by the European Commission Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030. It is a resource Centre on accessibility working on areas such as built environment, transport, information and communication technologies to ensure the participation of persons with disabilities in all areas of life on equal basis with others.

A free mobile app that wants to make the world more accessible for blind and low-vision people.

Guidance on building better digital services in government.

Federation of orgs working with people with disabilities to implement the UN CRPD and ensure their equal participation in society.

European Network for Accessible Tourism

Enterprises use Fable Engage to connect to people with disabilities for user research and accessibility testing.

Organisation that aims to embed digital accessibility in organisation and products

IA Labs specialise in website audits which will be measured against the Web Accessibility Directive.

An Irish accessibility consultancy that offers services in accessibility training, usability testing involving people with disabilities, audits, accessibility design reviews and conformance.

The mission of the IAAP is to define, promote, improve, and diversify the accessibility profession globally through certification, education, and networking in order to enable the creation of accessible products, content, services, and environments

Leader in accessible information technology. Their mission is to create an inclusive digital world for people with disabilities.

A charity committed to making sure people with unmet literacy and numeracy needs have access to learning opportunities and can fully take part in society.

Independent statutory body, advising Government on disability policy and practice and promoting Universal Design.

A community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier.

CEUD is dedicated to enabling the design of environments that can be accessed, understood and used regardless of a person's age, size, ability or disability.

A consultancy that asks, "is this accessible?" “is this accessible?”

A bookmarklet to make it easier to test WCAG’s Target Size and proposed Pointer Target Spacing requirements.

The world's leading digital accessibility toolkit

Chartability is a set of testable questions for ensuring that data visualisations, systems, and interfaces are accessible. Chartability is organised into principles with testable criteria and focused on creating an outcome that is an inclusive data experience for people with disabilities.

A tool for testing accessible colour combinations in print. This is useful for exhibition design.

A colour contrast analyser that will give you suggestions and recommendations that are accessible if ratios are not met.

A Chrome extension that generates a list of all of the headings levels on a page and directly access the content

‘Tools and resources to build offerings that are usable and delightful for people of all abilities.’

This Universal Design Playbook was created with the purpose of providing easy access to planning and facilitating universal design development work, whether it is short workshops or longer work sessions. That comes entirely down to what the user selects using the sorting functions on the page.

Sa11y is designed for content authors and focuses on content related issues and successes. Sa11y indicates errors or warnings at the source with a simple tooltip on how to fix.

Test your website against over 200 website accessibility checks with Silktide’s easy to understand accessibility checker.

Taba11y calculates the tab order of all elements and displays it visually, either by drawing a path or by highlighting the elements.

This is a guide to foreground colour accessibility on a background image. It is intended as guide for designers and developers to test if their design solution is accessible. Change the text size, colour and position. It will check the dimensions of the textarea against the background image.

Build and test against WCAG consistently. Understand each success criterion's meaning and how to be accessible.

This design system documents the styles, components and templates available to use on your website.

Lets you experience how people with different disabilities perceive a website. Simulate colour blindness, low vision, dyslexia and more. An easy-to-use tool both to increase understanding and lower the threshold to test accessibility on a website.

Use this tool to check that there is enough contrast between link text, regular text, and the background colour.

A tool that brings attention and understanding to how colour contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.

How do they work when navigating with alternative inputs?

Tables of contents provide a page overview and direct access to specific sections. When designing a table of contents, carefully compare different placement and styling options to maximise usability.

Fortunately, accessibility has been discussed a lot lately, but evidently, some biases and myths are still to be debunked.

Testing a form for accessibility can be boiled down to 6 high level goals.

In comparison to in-context filters, advanced search gives users an unnecessarily bad experience.

In this blog post, we will explore various strategies and best practices to bridge the gap between designers and developers focusing on accessibility.

In this guide, Sandrina breaks down what we need to take into consideration, so that nobody gets stuck on an inaccessible invalid field.

With one billion people aged 60 or older worldwide, inclusivity is more important than ever. Learn how to create digital experiences that empower independence and competence for older adults while enhancing usability for all.

A short guide on how to make custom selects, modals, autosuggest, date pickers, carousels and dynamically-loaded content more accessible

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn more about accessible and inclusive design.

A list of accessibility myths debunked

Designing services for people who need help with numbers.

Practical guidelines to prevent rage taps and rage clicks with accessible tap targets for icons, links and buttons — on desktop and on mobile. With useful techniques and guidelines.

While accordions can simplify long content pages and minimize scrolling, they diminish content visibility and increase interaction cost. On desktop, use accordions for content-heavy pages where users will not need to access content under several accordions.

A process for adding Sign Language to videos and some tips.

User photos and avatars are informational images. Do use clear and concise alternate text to describe them. Otherwise blind screen reader users won't have access to the same information as sighted people.

Write alt text that communicates an image's purpose without repeating page content. Focus on meaning rather than visual description.

This decision tree describes how to use the alt attribute in various situations. For some types of images, there are alternative approaches, such as using CSS background images for decorative images or web fonts instead of images of text.

An Introduction to Accessibility by the US Government

Accessible websites are still in the minority, but accessible apps are even rarer.

Common mistakes that people sometimes make when writing alt text

Some of Orange’s best practices for designing and developing a chatbot, it includes examples.

How to make the accessible names more user friendly.

Learn something new about accessibility with short and solid posts (less than 150 words).

Using a screen reader on a mobile device is challenging because users must access information sequentially and they cannot easily scan page content. Screen-reader users do not consider accessibility menus helpful.

Andy Baio takes a shot at visualising what is like to live with colourblindness

Helpful guide on ways to build an accessible chatbot.

Checkboxes allow users to select one, some, or none of items from a list. They can be used standalone, in checkbox lists, or nested checkbox lists.

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of colour and contrast.

An article about the causes of accessibility decay on websites and methods to stop it from happening

Conducting research with users who are blind or have low vision requires a little extra planning and adaptation compared to typical tests, but it is critical for truly improving the accessibility of designs.

The relationship between accessibility and usability and the best ways to convince companies to take both seriously were some of the audience questions answered by Jakob Nielsen at the Virtual UX Conference.

Cooper Hewitt’s Guidelines for Image Description is a living document on best practice in ALT and Long Description

Animation and accessibility are often seen as two separate powers at odds with one another. How is it possible to strike a balance between elements that move and the possible negative effects they expose to users who are sensitive to motion? Oriana García explains how her team at Mercado Libre tackled the challenge by creating guiding principles for applying animation to user interfaces and incorporating them into the team’s design system.

Discover best practices for creating an inclusive eCommerce experience. Learn how to optimise your website for accessibility and expand your reach.

Unlocking Creativity in the Name of Inclusion

10 dos and don’ts to keep in mind when designing accessible data visualisations

Best practices when using various accessible text over images techniques for designing your web and mobile app content. These practices can help you to make the text over images more accessible while retaining an aesthetically pleasing look.

In Part 2 of the series, Hannah Milan reviews in detail various accessible text over images techniques for designing your web and mobile app content, including framing the image, soft-colored gradients technique, text styles and text position, solid color shapes, and use of colored backgrounds

With an estimated one in every eight individuals worldwide surpassing the age of 60, who are actively adopting online shopping, the need for user-friendly interfaces tailored to their needs becomes apparent. Explore the guidelines to help you design inclusive products for all, particularly for an older audience and your future self.

An overview of simple interactions for voice command or speech recognition software users, and the accessibility barriers that can emerge.

Meryl Evans talks about how to navigate the nuances of disability language. Meryl lays out the different sides of disability language, how to recover from mistakes and different scenarios to help you learn.

Shorts tips on making a cookie banner accessible

Design effective error messages by ensuring they are highly visible, provide constructive communication, and respect user effort.

Some of the most intriguing and frequently asked questions about the EAA

Overview of the Irish implementing measures

Form functionality that websites often don’t consider. These strategies can make your forms more usable for all users and accessible for users with disabilities.

This is about designing forms that everyone can use and complete as quickly as possible. Because nobody actually wants to use your form. They just want the outcome of having used it.

Learn how to use the default screen reader included on Google touchscreen devices running Android operating system.

Accessibility for data visualisation extends well beyond web standards, at least if you’re trying to create an experience that’s actually useful. This article focuses on WCAG 2.1 standards, and it covers many techniques for embracing accessibility standards to empower better, more accessible visual design.

High quality captions and transcripts are good for business and a necessity for millions of people. Auto captions are not the best accessibility practice. Learn firsthand from a deaf speaker in the 8-minute video.

This resource introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web.

Users who are blind or have low vision prefer dictation over typing with a keyboard whenever possible. Screen readers on touchscreen devices are restricted to a well-defined set of gestures which makes interaction more challenging than on computers.

The BBC decided to create a bespoke typeface super accessible typeface.

This article contains a guide to building an accessible main navigation of a website in 5 steps. The key takeaways of this guide are HTML semantics, WAI-ARIA, CSS, and JS for accessibility.

Using Figma plugins and annotation kits.

An audio description is narration that describes what’s happening on-screen. They’re important because users with visual and cognitive disabilities need the audio description to understand the visual content.

Learn how to create engaging, WCAG-compliant animations that prioritize accessibility and create great user experiences.

As a designer, we can make the lives of our users easier by designing forms to be straightforward to complete and accessible to all. Here are some practical tips on how to design accessible forms.

An article about common mistakes and the best way to highlight required and optional form fields

Learn how to integrate accessibility into your UX research process. Learn best practices for inclusive user personas, usability testing, and more.

In this article, we’ll start with what charts and graphs need to be considered accessible. But, just because it’s accessible, doesn’t mean it’s the best user experience for all types of users. So, we’ll also go over opportunities for creating more usable data visualisations.

Interactive charts can transform data into compelling stories, offering valuable insights at a glance. But what happens when these visual tools are inaccessible to those with visual impairments? In this post, we’ll show you how to ensure your interactive charts are accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities.

Clear labels are essential to good information architecture. Think back to a time when you tried a new website or app and found it easy to use. Labelling likely played a key role.

The BBC's Global Experience Language has published recent guides on how to write text descriptions (alt text). Granted, the BBC has geared these toward publication on its own sites, however, you'll find lots of information you can use in your own day to day work. The guide approaches each type of text description, which makes learning how to write them less overwhelming.

The Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s (WCAG) Success Criterion 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast is one of the harder to understand requirements. Here’s a deep-dive into the details of it, including practical examples, concerning only its “User Interface Components” section.

In-page links, often embedded in the table of contents, help users navigate to specific content sections on the same page. While research showed increased user familiarity with the design pattern, carefully consider content structures before implementation.

An article that goes through why to choose HTML webpages over PDFs, when to use a PDF and some scenarios.

A blog trying to be a pattern library. All about designing inclusive web interfaces, piece by piece.

These Inclusive Design Principles are about putting people first. They are intended to give anyone involved in the design and development of websites a broad approach to inclusive design

A 4-part blog series about Accessibility and its interconnection with SEO.

Making text accessible should be part of everyday practice. However, general typographic practices of optimising legibility and readability don’t necessarily go all the way towards making text accessible.

An overview of the EAA in Ireland, the law’s key provisions concerning digital accessibility, and how it relates to the broader landscape of Irish accessibility laws.

While CAPTCHAS might be necessary for security purposes, they have a negative impact on usability.

This presentation covers key considerations for building accessible WordPress websites, including recommendations for plugins and policies that your organisation can enact to better guide content managers into maintaining their site’s accessibility.

We must take care to make our content as easy to understand and accessible as possible. This article discusses PDF and climate change, Legal documents and PDF, and What research proves HTML is better than PDF?

Chatbots can be one of the most frustrating and inaccessible parts of a website. They can also create a quick and wonderful customer experience. It’s all about how you make them…

Why you need to monitor and report on accessibility—all the time

Standards and principles that combine neurodiversity and user experience design for Learning Management Systems.

Squarespace, like other no-code content management systems (CMS), is a common choice for people who want to easily create a website. Choosing Squarespace comes with pros and cons when making a site accessible for people with disabilities.

No overlay product on the market can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk. This page is a fact sheet and gives a broad overview about accessibility overlays.

Article on the European Accessibility Act

Writers always get the advice to be concise, but doing so is easier said than done. These tips and tricks help reduce your word count.

No, and why not.

On e-commerce websites, a strikethrough element is often used to indicate a price is no longer valid and often has a reduced price next to it. The problem is that most screen readers don’t output the strikethrough semantics.

Ben Myers shares the difference between subtitles, closed captions, and open captions.

A talk from Axe-con 2022 by Nic Chan

Why it’s important in 3 examples

Why are so many websites not accessible and what can be done about that

To create accessible and inclusive experiences, you need to pay attention to accessibility throughout your design process, not just at the end.

Cookie notices have the potential to violate web accessibility laws. In this piece, a WCAG auditor shares some cookie banner error patterns that can massively hurt a page’s overall conformance.

A closer look at some of the problems identified with auto-generated alt text for images.

A short article about the problems of disabling paste in form fields and

Are your data visualisations leaving some users behind? Learn essential design principles to create accessible charts for all.

Indicators and Benchmarks for Success

In the world of web development, we strive to create experiences that cater to the needs of our users. We segment them into different categories, define personas, and make assumptions about what we consider “normal.” However, the truth is that “normal” doesn’t really exist when it comes to web users.

As a blind person and accessibility leader Léonie Watson gives her thoughts on whether skin tone should be mentioned in alt text.

Tips to consider when designing for reduced motion.

8 key tips for accessible typography

A study of 20,000 academic PDFs from 2014 to 2023 has revealed an alarming trend: accessibility is getting worse, not better. Less than 3.2% of these documents meet basic accessibility standards, making it nearly impossible for blind or low-vision users to engage with the content

When conducting usability testing with older adults, understand your participants’ needs and accommodate them accordingly.

UX checklists with best design practices, accessibility guidelines, design system checklist, tables UX checklist, UX research methods, form design UX and flowcharts.

Designing data visualisation to be more visually accessible using patterns, shapes, and high contrast colours

The process of audio describing is highly nuanced, particularly when it comes to understanding what should/shouldn’t be described, when you should describe it, and how to describe it. Finding the right balance takes time, and we’ve compiled some key guidelines for understanding impactful and compliant descriptions.

R/GA group creative director Kyle Wheeler looks at how if you design with inclusivity in mind throughout a project, everyone wins.

Rethinking the Carousel: A User Experience Perspective

Accessibility Tips and Tricks for Designers and Developers

Why overlays don’t work with demonstrations from a users perspective.

You probably can’t write text that conveys the entire meaning of a chart. But, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.

This episode looks at 1.2 Time-based media. What if you couldn't hear a podcast, or see an action scene in a movie? There should be alternative ways to experience the things you enjoy.

An eight-step checklist that you can use to help ensure your PDFs are fully accessible.