Accessibility 101

Demystifying digital and physical accessibility starts with "Accessibility 101." This guide unpacks key practices for creating inclusive experiences. Everyone, regardless of ability, deserves equal access to information, products, and participation in society.


Dive deeper in the sections below to explore how to remove barriers!

Section Pages

Here are some key principles and strategies:

  1. Understand the Scope: Accessibility isn't just about wheelchair ramps or screen readers for the blind. It encompasses various disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, cognitive, and neurological impairments. Recognizing this diversity is essential for designing inclusive experiences.
  2. Standards: Adhering to established accessibility standards, such as the Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), ensures that your content and designs meet recognized criteria for accessibility. These guidelines provide specific recommendations for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
  3. Prioritize User Experience: Accessibility is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Understand the needs and preferences of diverse users through user testing, feedback, and usability studies. Design with empathy and prioritize user experience to create inclusive products and environments.
  4. Consider Multiple Modalities: People interact with content and environments in various ways. Provide multiple modalities for accessing information, such as text alternatives for images, captions for videos, and keyboard navigation for websites. This ensures that individuals can choose the mode that best suits their needs.
  5. Design for Scalability and Flexibility: Accessibility benefits everyone, not just individuals with disabilities. Designing for accessibility improves usability for all users, including older adults, individuals with temporary impairments, and those in challenging environments. Aim for scalability and flexibility in your designs to accommodate diverse user needs.
  6. Educate and Raise Awareness: Accessibility is a shared responsibility. Educate stakeholders, designers, developers, and content creators about accessibility principles and best practices. Foster a culture of inclusion and raise awareness about the importance of designing with accessibility in mind.
  7. Continuous Improvement: Accessibility is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Regularly evaluate and improve the accessibility of your content, products, and environments based on feedback, new technologies, and evolving best practices. Embrace a mindset of continuous improvement to create truly inclusive experiences for all.

By following these fundamental principles and integrating accessibility into your design and development processes from the outset, you can create more inclusive and equitable experiences for everyone, regardless of their abilities or limitations.

Its pretty common knowledge but the most common accessibility mistakes are:

  1. Insufficient color contrast
  2. Inadequate keyboard access and visual focus indicator
  3. Missing or poor alternative text on images
  4. Meaningless link text
  5. Illegible resized text

These common mistakes are addressed in various forms throughout this guide and these mistakes are required to be fixed to pass any kind of accessibility test.

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