Contents
Here are a couple of organisations that we refer to for guidance. They are considered to be the gold standard in accessibility.
- WebAIM. This stands for The Web Accessibility in Mind Project. The website has articles, tutorials, and forums. They also have simulations which are useful for testing websites.
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is the global authority on accessible design standards. They’re responsible for developing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and 2.1. Overview of web accessibility guidelines.
- Government Digital Service (GDS). They’re responsible for building platforms and digital services across UK government departments.
- GOV.UK style guide
We’ll continue to update this list with resources to help you with accessibility.
If you have any suggestions for resources that you think should be on the list, please let us know.
Assistive technology
- Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility (WebAIM)
- Testing with assistive technologies (GOV.UK)
- Free assistive technology tools for website testing (GOV.UK)
Understanding different users
- Finding participants for user research (GOV.UK)
- Running research sessions with disabled people (GOV.UK)
- User profiles of people with access needs (GOV.UK)
- Stories of web users (W3C)
- Web accessibility perspective videos (W3C)
- User profiles and barriers faced online (GOV.UK)
- Low vision user needs (W3C)
- Practices that hurt dyslexic users (UX Movement)
Writing accessible content
- Plain English Campaign
- Plain English guides (including A to Z of alternative words)
- Accessibility writing tips (W3C)
- Content design blog at Scope
- Writing content for everyone (Government Digital Service)
- Hemingway App free writing and readability tool. It highlights sentences that are hard or very hard to read. It also gives you a readability grade.
- Creating content for screenreaders (GOV.UK)
- Content design: planning, writing and managing content (GDS)
- Ampersands, date arranges and contractions: style guidance (GDS)
- Gunning Fog Index free readability tool. This estimates how many years of education you need to understand the text on first reading.
Publishing accessible content
- Five golden rules for compliant alt text (AbilityNet)
- Writing alt text (GOV.UK)
- Publishing accessible documents (GDS)
- Creating accessible tables (WebAIM)
Developer tools
- Making your frontend accessible (GOV.UK)
- WAVE Web accessibility evaluation tool
- Page structure (W3C)
- How to create accessible forms (W3C)
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) (Moz)
- Web accessibility evaluation tools list (W3C)
- Navigation menu structure (W3C)
Using colour
- WebAIM contrast checker
- WCAG colour contrast checker chrome extension
- Colour text contrast checker
- Coblis colour blindness simulator
- Colour Oracle colour blindness app
- How users change colour on a website (GDS)
Images
- Alt-text decision tree (W3C)
- Image concepts and purpose (W3C)
- Types of images (W3C)
- Image decision tree (W3C)
- Complex images (W3C)
- How to make accessible animated images (BBC)
Video media accessibility
- Making Audio and Video Media Accessible (W3C)
- Video captions (W3C)
- Captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions (WebAIM)
- Accessible GIFs WordPress plugin
PDF accessibility
If you need to provide a PDF, follow accessibility best practices. And always create an alternative accessible version to go with it.
These are some resources to help make your PDFs as accessible as possible:
- Adobe PDF accessibility
- Create accessible PDFs (Microsoft)
- Tab and reading order in PDF documents (W3)
- Creating bookmarks in PDF documents (W3)