Accessibility is a vital aspect of designing and developing digital products, as it fosters inclusivity for individuals with disabilities, ensuring that everyone can participate fully in the digital world.
As our world becomes increasingly digitized, the significance of building accessible digital products has never been more important. Accessibility ensures that everyone, including people with disabilities, can access, understand, and navigate digital content with ease. This inclusion is not just a matter of compliance or social responsibility; it's a fundamental aspect of creating a product that truly serves the widest possible audience.
To ensure that the digital products delivered by Infinum incorporate accessibility principles at every stage of the product design and development lifecycle, we’ve created the Accessibility Handbook.
Its design chapter elaborates on the adapted WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) principles, providing examples of both compliance and non-compliance with the WCAG’s Level A. WCAG is a set of guidelines created by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the main international standards organization for the web.
The digital accessibility principles we implement in our projects are organized in the same way as the WCAG principles. There are three conformance levels across four categories – level A being the minimum level of accessibility in a digital product:
- A - Includes providing text alternatives for non-text content, making sure that the site is usable when stylesheets are turned off, and ensuring that the site is keyboard accessible. It level also includes support for TalkBack/VoiceOver.
- AA - On top of the Level A guidelines, this level takes additional steps to ensure that content is accessible to users in a wider range of scenarios. Most accessibility regulations require this level at the moment.
- AAA - Represents the highest level of conformance and the strictest set of guidelines. It aims to make information and user interfaces accessible to all users, including those with severe disabilities. This level is recommended for tools that have elderly and disabled people as a target group.
Each of the levels is applied to the four main categories: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
- Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways that they can perceive.
- Operable - User interface components and navigation must be easy to use and intuitive.
- Understandable - Information and the operation of the user interface must be clear for everyone to understand.
- Robust - Information must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by various user agents, including assistive technologies.
It's important to review the product’s accessibility to catch possible issues that may have occurred during the development phase. For that reason, we introduced an accessibility review. Additionally, we came up with a list of useful plugins and tools to supercharge your accessibility workflow.
Check out our Accessibility Guidelines Figma Community file, where we show an overview of our guidelines along with the Checklist Template.