Standard HTML is accessible right out of the box. There’s no muss, no fuss as long as you stick with vanilla HTML. There are a number of other things I recommend you do before we get started.
Bookmark these sites:
- Mozilla Developer’s Network HTML Elements Reference
- MDN’s ARIA Reference
- WAI-ARIA’s Authoring Practices
- WAI’s WCAG Quick Reference
OK, there’s some weird words and abbreviations and whatnot. Don’t sweat it. Mozilla is the company behind the popular Firefox browser. Their HTML and ARIA references are very useful, so keep them handy.
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and is a set of properties you can apply to your HTML elements to fill in occasional gaps in accessibility. For instance, imagine an FAQ where each question is a button that can expand or collapse the associated answer. This is a very common pattern, you very well may have seen it before. Often each button has a visual affordance to indicate that it controls an expandable, typically a little caret. When the expandable is collapsed, the caret points up, when the button is clicked, the answer expands, and the caret rotates so it points down.
Google something, and look at the “People also ask” section. It’s just such an accordion with caret signifiers.
WAI stands for Web Accessibility Initiative. They develop standards for web accessibility. You refer to their standards and reference materials to understand and implement accessibility. The standard they developed is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.
WCAG (currently in 2.1) is a set of criteria to measure the success of various aspects of your site. It’s T-shirt sized into A, AA, and AAA. A is the basic minimum you should be doing, AA gives you very complete coverage, and AAA is when you feel like going above and beyond. We will be limiting ourselves to A and AA, so for our purposes there are 50 success criteria. This will probably change with future updates to WCAG.
This is a good start; you have some good tools on hand, and you’re becoming familiar with some terminology.
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