Experience Accessibility First-Hand on May 21, 2020
(Source, and for more information, visit the GAAD website)
Whether you participate in a public or private event to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we encourage designers, developers, usability professionals, and everyone else to take an hour to experience first-hand the impact of digital accessibility (or lack thereof).
Go Mouseless For An Hour
Go ahead and unplug your mouse and only use your keyboard alone (tab/shift tab, arrow keys, enter and spacebar) to navigate and interact with your favorite websites and applications. If you use a touchpad, trackpad or similar input method, disable it, and use the keyboard instead.
Developers and designers, we encourage you to visit a site you were involved in creating and take it for a test-drive.
- Is there a visible focus indicator (i.e., do you know where you are) at all times as you navigate each screen using the tab and shift tab keys?
- Are you able to interact with every element that receives focus using the keyboard alone?
- If there is any element that provides functionality if you hover over it with your mouse, such as revealing a tooltip or a set of actions, can you display this strictly using the keyboard alone?
Enlarge Your Fonts
Check that your page(s) is accessible and usable for low vision/visually impaired users.
To do this, use your browser and resize the text to 200 percent. Now look at the screen, and make sure there is no loss of content or functionality.
Have all elements resized, including all widgets?
To meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines V2.0 Level AA, the only allowable exceptions are captions and images of text.
Check for Sufficient Color Contrast
An often forgotten but important accessibility item is making sure that a page has sufficient color contrast.
Download a color contrast analyzer such as this one from The Paciello Group (which works for Windows and Mac) or Deque’s color contrast analyzer and find out how your page(s) stack up.