📒
UX Resource for UCSC Genomics Institute
  • Overview
  • Before starting
    • Think about the user
    • Review other tools
    • Write it out
  • During design
    • Create your designs
  • Getting feedback
    • Who, when, why of feedback
    • Step 1: Heuristic Evaluation
    • Step 2: Talk to users and show them your designs
    • How to do surveys
    • How to sort through feedback
  • best practices
    • Best general design
    • Basic visual design
    • Basic accessibility
  • Glossary
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • More Resources
  • Quick Start UCSC resource:
  • General guidelines
  • Accessibility tools
  • Tools for choosing colors
  • Command line tools

Was this helpful?

  1. best practices

Basic accessibility

PreviousBasic visual designNextGlossary

Last updated 3 years ago

Was this helpful?

Access to the web is a basic human right, meaning that anyone should be able to use and access sites on the web such as those we are building. There are common, low-hanging things you can do to make your website accessible:

  • Use a color-blind friendly color palette (or have options to enable a color-blind friendly mode). If you have access to people in your group that are colorblind, they may be a good litmus test for how colorblind-friendly your color palettes are.

  • Have alt-text on images to that those using screen readers, like the blind, will have images described to them

It's good to keep these things in mind from the beginning as it means you can hopefully avoid having to go back and make massive changes later after discovering something is completely unusable for a certain group.

More Resources

The two points above are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of accessibility and there are many more things you can do to make your web application as accessible as possible. Below are more resources where you can learn more.

Quick Start UCSC resource:

General guidelines

Accessibility tools

Here are some tools you can use to check basic accessibility and find low-hanging issues:

Tools for choosing colors

Command line tools

Most of this page is about making websites accessible. While command-line tools are generally accessible (plain text and don't depend heavily on colors), there are some things to avoid that are detailed in . In short, avoid only encoding important information via color and avoid ASCII art as it can interfere with screen readers.

this Stackoverflow thread
https://www.ucop.edu/information-technology-services/_files/word-pdf-accessibility-guide.pdf
Understanding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - Accessibility | MDN
Accessibility - W3C
Logo
Color vision simulation - Firefox Developer Tools | MDN
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Logo
Browser Extensions
Logo
Toptal Color Blind Filter
Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator!Coolors.co
Paletton - The Color Scheme Designer
Command Line Developer Tools
Logo
Logo
Logo
Logo
Logo
Logo