Accessibility commonly refers to the activity of making applications highly usable for people with disabilities.
We’re interested here in web accessibility, which focuses on accessibility in web applications.
The most important and comprehensive site discussing Web Accessibility is the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Their home page has a list of Resources, including introductions, tips, FAQs, guidelines, checklists and descriptions of techniques for making sites accessible.
Of particular interest to Web Designers is the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This should be considered required reading. It describes 14 guidelines for making web content accessible:
Under each guideline are several checkpoints. There are over 60 checkpoints in all. The W3C has published a prioritized list of these checkpoints. They are ranked as follows:
The W3C's checklist is excellent: you would be wise to read all these checkpoints (there are a few dozen!) and look at the associated implementation techniques that accompany them. (This could take upwards of 20 hours to read and study properly, even for experienced web designers, but is well worth it.)
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. Check out:
You can certify yourself that you conform to W3C Accessibility Checkpoints and put a logo on your conforming pages. You can claim Level A (Priority 1 checkpoints met), Double-A (Priority 1 and 2 met) or Triple-A (Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints met). If you use these logos you are responsible for actually meeting the checkpoints.
The ca.gov site has an entire section of their site detailing their conformance to accessibility requirements.
The Nielsen Norman Group has lots of articles on accessibility. These are required reading!
Here are some notes on teaching accessibility.
Like React? Here is the Accessibility Guide from the official React docs.
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