Resources + Tools

Resources

General

• Firstly Shelter has its own Accessibility guidelines & best practices explaining why this is important and how to flag issues, etc

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (“WCAG”) list the global standards expected for Digital from “A” (lowest), to “AAA” (highest). Shelter needs to meet AA on all its user-facing digital estate. (However because these guidelines are a bit wordy you might find it easier to start with Gov.uk’s summary).

• Google offers a free online training course for accessibility  

Government Digital Service (GDS)

The GDS has a lot of different resources, including these excellent Do’s and Don’ts Accessibility posters - sample to the right. (Print these out and put them up!) 

They also have an https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/blog, and various training videos on youtube including: How we do accessibility and inclusion

Open

‘The Big Hack’ resources from Scope

This is a set of really useful guidelines on how to create accessible content, UX, and code:

https://bighack.org/

You might want to start with: https://bighack.org/assistive-technology-devices-definitions-how-disabled-people-use-the-web/ )

Discipline-specific resources

Please add to these lists whenever you discover something useful.

Resources for Content + UX teams

• How to write better alt-text descriptions

• A guide to using subtitles, captions and transcripts

• Heading structure and accessibility

• Inclusive language guidelines 

Resources for social teams

• Is your social media campaign accessible to everybody?

Resources for technical teams

• GDS blog on why content should be created in HTML instead of PDFs

• Before starting to implement new features, you should consider how accessible it will be. There are many great resources with sample markup that you can use as a base for your feature.  https://inclusive-components.design/  https://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/  https://github.com/scottaohara/accessible_components  

Tools 

Browser and development tools

Technical teams can use these to help test their work’s accessibility.

• Chrome dev tools has an accessibility auditor built into Lighthouse 

• When testing on desktop devices use VoiceOver on Mac, and NVDA on Windows. Default iOS and Android should be used on mobile

• https://github.com/IBMa/equal-access/blob/master/README.md  

• Axe Web Accessibility Testing: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe-web-accessibility-tes/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd  

Colour contrast checkers

These enable you to check that text and ui elements meet minimum foreground and background colour contrast requirements for Digital:

• WebAIM https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/  

• Contrast Checker: https://contrastchecker.com/  

Other

Simulators

These allow you to empathise with users with access needs

• https://www.funkify.org/