Law & Policy
These types of laws are designed to protect people from discrimination based on characteristics like disability, gender, or race.
What are civil rights laws?
This word is the shorthand numeronym for accessibility.
What is a11y?
This descriptive text is essential for describing images so that screen reader users can understand visual content.
What is alternative text (alt text)?
When designing a layout, using left-aligned text (or right-aligned for RTL) instead of center-aligned helps improve this quality for users with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities.
What is readability (or legibility)?
Designers and developers should always ensure that web content is compatible with this kind of tool, which reads text aloud to users who are blind or have low vision.
What is a screen reader?
Websites must meet these guidelines, which define international standards for web accessibility.
What are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)?
This markup framework, abbreviated ARIA, enhances accessibility by adding roles and properties to elements in dynamic web content.
What is Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)?
Using only color to indicate a correct answer in a quiz excludes learners with this common type of visual impairment.
What is color blindness?
Designing content so that all actions can be completed without a mouse supports users who rely on this input method.
What is keyboard navigation? (or voice navigation)
This requirement is crucial for input fields so that users with screen readers can know what kind of data is being requested.
What is a label (or aria-label)?
Signed into law in 1990, this landmark U.S. legislation protects the rights of people with disabilities in areas like employment, transportation, and public accommodations.
What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?
This kind of document, called an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) when it's filled out, explains how well a digital product follows accessibility rules.
What is a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)?
These tags create a document structure and help screen readers quickly jump between sections of a page.
What are headings?
This styling feature for animation can provide a safe alternative for users with ADHD, Vestibular Disorder, or Epilepsy.
What is Prefers Reduced Motion?
This popular tool, often used by developers to test accessibility, evaluates whether websites meet WCAG guidelines and other best practices that can be automated.
What is Axe (or Lighthouse)?
This 2019 law aims to make Canada fully accessible by 2040, focusing on removing barriers in federally regulated sectors.
What is the Accessible Canada Act?
This group of tools, abbreviated as AT, includes software and devices like screen readers and voice recognition tools that help users interact with technology.
What is Assistive Technology?
This accessibility requirement provides a text-based representation of spoken dialogue and important sounds.
What are captions, subtitles, or transcripts?
Using clear, descriptive link text like “Download the syllabus” instead of this generic phrase makes navigation easier for screen reader users.
What is "click here"?
In JavaScript, this event handler ensures that all custom interactive elements built with DIVs are accessible using only a keyboard.
What is keydown or keyup event (keyboard events)?
This European Union rule requires public sector websites and mobile apps to be accessible to people with disabilities.
What is the European Accessibility Act?
Created in 1995, the screen reader JAWS is an acronym made up of these words.
What is Job Access With Speech?
Without this feature, a PDF is basically just a picture — inaccessible to screen readers and impossible to navigate by structure.
What is tagging?
The WCAG 2.1 Level AA minimum color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 is based on the relative difference in this property between text and its background.
What is luminance?
This ARIA property helps engineers specify whether an element should be included or excluded from the accessibility tree, improving screen reader performance.
What is `aria-hidden`?