Accessibility

The federal government is accountable for making all of its products 508 compliant, which means everything we make (or buy) needs to be accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. This usually means making sure our products can be used with screen readers and alternate input devices, and that they’re logically easy to follow.

Leadership

Mike Matis (CoE) and Jason Nakai (18F) lead the , external,accessibility guild.

Communication

Slack room

, external,TTS-only, #g-accessibility — Ask about any accessibility-related topic.

GitHub repo

, external,Accessibility

Documentation

• , external,Accessibility Guide
• Working Groups and Guilds

Training

TTS hosts monthly training sessions to help you learn how to build accessible products. The class is required for all developers, who must attend the class at least once (but can attend as many times as they like). Folks from other teams are encouraged to attend as well. Find the class schedule on the , external,Working Groups and Guilds calendar.

Making a project accessible

The easiest way to make a project accessible is to think about accessibility from the start. Retrofitting accessibility is very costly. As you might expect, certain libraries and tools are not great for accessibility — for example, Bootstrap's color scheme and some of its form elements are not accessible by default. These are things that should be taken into consideration at the start of a project, before you've dedicated substantial time and energy to it.

As you think about accessibility, here are some good rules to follow:

• Everything on your project should be usable with a keyboard.
• All form elements should have explicit labeling (not visible — they can be hidden if needed, but they have a label with a for attribute.
• Text should have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 in most cases.

If you remember these three things, you'll avoid 90% of accessibility issues right off the bat.

Everything else in 508 is about improving the user experience. To learn more, sign up for our monthly training session, review the , external,Accessibility Guide, and come to one of our meetings.