Accessibility Awareness

Chartability is a resource to help make data visualizations and charts more accessible. It's organized into principles with testable criteria aimed at making sure people with disabilities are able to access data.

chartability.fizz.studio

Setting up a screen reader testing environment on your computer — The personal website of Sara Soueidan, inclusive Web UI engineer

Manual testing with a screen reader will help you catch and fix accessibility issues that can't be identified by automated tests. Sara Soueidan has a great guide on various screen readers and how to set them up on your computer.

www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/testing...

When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.

If possible, use "direct labeling" in your data visualizations and charts. This means positioning the labels directly beside or adjacent to the data points. This is better than color coding your charts, as your information would likely be lost to someone who can’t see color.

When possible, offer users multiple ways of understanding your content. This includes graphics, charts, summaries of long documents, etc. If you have lots of math-heavy concepts, consider alternatives. These things can help everyone, especially people with cognitive disabilities.

Plain language is communication that your audience can understand the first time they hear or read it. This varies by audience, of course. What is common vocabulary for accountants won't necessarily be common for chemists, clergy, or engineers. Know your audience.

Accessibility: Why Social Media & Web Content Need to Be Accessible Content accessibility isn't just design and production's job. It's everyone's job. Here's how content creators can create accessible content.

Meryl Evans' "Why and How to Create Accessible Social Media and Website Content" introduces content creators to basic accessibility considerations for links, hashtags, emojis, alt text, transcripts, and more.

meryl.net/digital-cont...

Sighted users often use bold or large fonts to create the appearance of headings in documents. People using screen readers have no way of understanding these visual cues. Use heading styles from the styles menu to correctly format headings.

Don’t stuff your alt text with keywords without context. If your alt text is just a collection of keywords, it will just sound like a gibberish string. It won’t describe what’s actually in the image, and won't help a blind user get a context or content of the image.

Customizable Text Short video about customizable text for web accessibility - what is it, who depends on it, and what needs to happen to make it work.

Some people need to change the way text is displayed in order to read it. This includes changing size, spacing, font, color, and other properties. When people customize text, the text should re-flow so they don’t have to scroll horizontally to read.

www.w3.org/WAI/perspect...

Don't forget to add alt text on Instagram and Facebook, too. When you forget, the auto-generated alt text is not as helpful, complete, or accurate as human-written alt text. A.I. can't know the purpose of a photo. Always add your own alt text on Instagram and Facebook.

When you can, avoid number-only date formats. Sighted users could be confused on whether the first number is the month or day. If you've incorrectly designated your document's language, screen reader users might hear the wrong date. Writing out the month prevents this confusion.

Some argue web accessibility is super expensive and time-consuming. That's true if you wait till the end and have to rebuild the site. But if you consider accessibility from the beginning and your team knows what to do, then accessibility doesn't have be costly or time-consuming.

Everyone who works on a website has a role to ensure the site and its content are accessible. This resource from Vox Media breaks down some accessibility tasks by job role, including content creators, designers, developers, project managers, and testers.

accessibility.voxmedia.com

When creating PDFs, avoid using "Print to PDF." A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of PDFs created this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost. Using "Save As" or "Export" can preserve these tags.

10 Ways to Improve Accessibility on Websites and Social Media - Lireo Designs My 10 tips for making your website and social media more accessible, whether you're a blogger, photographer, writer, designer, or developer.

For people just getting introduced to accessibility concepts, the number of resources can be overwhelming for people who don't know where to start. These 10 tips from Lireo Designs can be a good way to introduce your team to the basics.

www.lireo.com/10-ways-to-i...

Focus on word choice when using plain language. Use strong verbs in the active voice. Use words the audience knows. Make titles or list elements parallel, which could include starting each with a verb. For websites, match the link wording to landing page names.

If you have a hashtag with multiple words, write the hashtag in #PascalCase or #camelCase to help users of screen readers. That helps the screen reader to read out the words out individually, rather than trying to read them in one long word.

Avoid character complexity in fonts. Simpler shapes and patterns of typographical text are more quickly and accurately analyzed by the human mind. Be careful with complex fonts, especially for long sections of text.

For screen readers to recognize headings, heading text can't just be body text or normal text that's been made to look bigger and bolder. It must be formatted as a heading. In Microsoft Word and Google Docs, this can be done in the styles box. In HTML, use the tags h1 through h6.

You don't necessarily need to say "image of" in your alt text for users to know it's an image. Screen readers will announce that it's an image. But it can help readers to specify if it's a hand-drawn image, Polaroid, infographic, screenshot, chart, map, diagram, or so on.

Captions/Subtitles Helps you understand and create captions (also called “subtitles”) for audio and video media accessibility.

Automated captions and transcripts can save time so that you don't have to manually transcribe on your own. But automated captions and transcripts aren't 100% accurate, so they need manual editing before you publish them.

www.w3.org/WAI/media/av...

The Game Accessibility Guidelines have been put together by game studios, specialists and academics. While they are not an official set of standards or documents, they are a collection of tips and techniques to help developers make games more inclusive.

gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

In presentations, talk at a moderate pace and enunciate. Pause between phrases, sentences, and questions so people can read the captions and respond. Have speakers take turns and state their name before speaking. This helps everyone, including people captioning in real time.

If you feel like you don't know what you don't know about accessibility, it can help to follow folks who discuss assistive technology, accessibility and disability. Here's a Bluesky list of people who post a lot about those topics.

bsky.app/profile/a11y...

Find Digital Accessibility Jobs on A11yjobs.com Discover top jobs in digital accessibility, including web accessibility, ARIA, WCAG, Section 508, ADA compliance, and more. Join the A11y community with roles on a11yjobs.com.

Looking for a digital accessibility job? Or looking to hire someone for an accessibility role? A11yjobs is a digital accessibility job board.

www.a11yjobs.com

Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization How do you write text that conveys the whole meaning of a visualization? You probably can’t. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try

Many struggle with writing alt text for charts and other other data visualizations. Amy Cesal's "Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization" hammers home the importance of explaining the chart type, the type of data, and the reason for the chart.

medium.com/nightingale/...

Thanks for the heads up! This must be a fairly new change, as it wasn't a paid course in the past. I'll take this out of the rotation for tips to share on this account. Thanks for alerting me to this!

"An Introduction to Accessibility and Inclusive Design" is a course offered by The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through Coursera. This course introduces some fundamental principles, including assistive technology and adaptive strategies.

www.coursera.org/learn/access...

A refreshable Braille display is a device that takes a computer screen's text and generates it in Braille by raising and lowering pins through holes on a flat surface. The display refreshes as the user moves through the screen's content.

www.afb.org/node/16207/r...