Over the last few months I have decided to move most of my accessibility writing over to Siteimp.com - that product is a very good accessibility scanner and it has already helped me think through building more accessible applications. Heck, I used Siteimp to build Siteimp (long story).
I have been getting deep into accessibility and have covered topics like ARIA roles and attributes and went deep into the Government of Canada's new accessibility standards, but I haven't written anything with practical advice that anyone can start implementing right away in awhile. So I decided to write down my top ten tips for building more accessible applications.
You should read the whole article because I get into each of these in some depth, but I will reproduce the tips here:
- Learn to use a screen reader.
- Colour is important: pay attention to things like contrast ratios but do not only only upon colour to convey information.
- Write semantic HTML.
- Alt text is very important for images.
- Use things like captions and transcriptions so that media is accessible to all.
- Support full keyboard navigation (and test it).
- Pay careful attention to your headings; they're a common way for people who use screen readers to skim content.
- Make sure your links have clear and descriptive anchor text.
- Design forms to be accessible, properly laid out and well labelled.
- And remember, most drop-in accessibility overlays are complete garbage.
Learning to use a screen reader is likely the most important of all ten because once you learn to use a screen reader well enough to use it as your daily driver, the other nine just kind of fall into place. To learn more about accessibility, check out the full article on ten tips to build more accessible websites on siteimp.