Resources for Learning Web Accessibility

If you’d like to learn about accessibility but don’t know where to start, this is the post for you.

We've compiled a list of resources that we think are useful when it comes to learning web accessibility. Whether you learn best from official documentation, online courses, blog posts, or written tutorials, we've got you covered.

Documentation

Let's start with some official documentation. Fair warning: Be prepared for some acronyms.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains web accessibility standards called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Version 2.2 was released on July 20, 2023, and is the latest version at the time of writing. If you've ever been told that your site needs to be "WCAG-compliant", these are the standards your site will need to meet.

Part of the W3C is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which, as the name suggests, develops standards and materials for web accessibility. One of these standards is the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA, or just ARIA), which is particularly useful for parts of a website that are dynamic (e.g., UI elements that utilize JavaScript).

Helpful sites

The official standards can be a bit difficult to parse sometimes. Here are some links to tutorials and other sites with explanations that can be easier to understand:

• WAI web accessibility tutorials

• Using ARIA in HTML

• ARIA authoring practices guide

• Accessibility Developer Guide

• web.dev accessibility tutorials

Online courses

If you learn best via video and coding along, then these courses (both free and paid) are excellent options:

• Testing Accessibility (paid) – a course by one of the most well-known members of the field, Marcy Sutton, that teaches accessibility concepts and has valuable modules on how to test accessibility.

• Practical Accessibility (paid) – a course by another industry expert, Sara Soueidan, that teaches accessibility from the ground up, including how to navigate the official standards documentation.

• A11ycasts with Rob Dodson (free) – a YouTube tutorial series that focuses on accessibility fundamentals.

• Web Accessibility: Developing with Empathy (free) – a Udacity course built in collaboration with Google that teaches web accessibility basics.

Blog posts

If your learning style is more geared towards reading, then you may find these blog posts on a variety of web accessibility topics to be helpful:

• Zaengle blog posts on accessibility – a compilation of all Zaengle blog posts about accessibility.

• A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components (Smashing Magazine) – useful tools and techniques to help developers build accessible websites.

• When CSS Isn't Enough: JavaScript Requirements for Accessible Components (Smashing Magazine) – a guide to using JavaScript to make components accessible when CSS alone won't do the trick.

• Setting Up a Screen Reader Testing Environment on Your Computer (Sara Soueidan) – a walkthrough of how to set up the necessary tools for testing your work locally with a screen reader.

• A Guide to Designing Accessible, WCAG-Compliant Focus Indicators (Sara Soueidan) – a guide to accessible focus indicators, aimed at both designers and developers.

• Accessible Text Labels for All (Sara Soueidan) – a guide to improving e-commerce experiences for screen reader users without breaking them for speech-input users.

• Designing for Accessibility: Improving UX for Everyone – an accessibility guide created in partnership by O3 World and Seer Interactive.

Useful tools

As a bonus, here are some useful tools that can help you build accessible websites:

• WCAG compliance checklist from The A11Y Project

• HTML5 accessibility checker

• WebAIM contrast checker

• WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool

• Random accessible color combinations

Wrapping up

We applaud you for wanting to learn web accessibility and know that it can be daunting. Having gone through this learning process ourselves, we also know how important it is to have good resources at your disposal.

We hope you found this list useful, and we'd love to hear from you if you have any great web accessibility resources that you'd like to share. Let us know @zaengle.