Accessibility Resources
Want to make your content more accessible?
Here’s a list of tools, guides and resources you can use.
Audio and video
Capcut
Add subtitles to your videos for free, with Capcut.
Guide to captions
A short, clear guide to captioning social media content from the wonderful Alexa Heinrich and the team at Accessible Social.
Descript
A powerful AI tool that lets you transcribe, overdub and edit videos. Descript has a free version and priced options for advanced functions.
When I last checked, the free version let you automatically remove words like um and ah, and export one video a month.
How to write a transcript
Rev is a speech-to-text transcription software. Their guide on how to write a transcript of audio or video is excellent.
Subly
Subly automates captions and transcripts for your video. It’s not free, but you can get a 7 day free trial. Subly’s auto captions are the best I’ve ever come across. Like all AI tools, it’s been trained on specific accents and voices, so it doesn’t serve everyone equally. I found it’s particularly accurate at recognising British and American accents.
A Guide to Captioned video
Check out Meryl Evans' complete guide to captioned videos. It’s amazingly thorough, detailed and practical.
video descriptions
Another simple, practical guide from Accessible Social, this one’s about how to write video descriptions.
Design
Dos and donts of designing for accessibility
I love these simple and easy to use posters from gov.uk on the dos and donts of designing for accessibility.
They cover practical tips for designing for: users on the autistic spectrum, users of screenreaders, people with low vision, deaf or hard of hearing people, dyslexic people and people with physical or motor disabilities.
Designing for low vision
Some brilliant resources on how to design for people with low vision and people who use assistive technology, by Veronica Lewis.
(Also I love how Veronica calls herself Veroniiiica. Inspired by the slang ‘four eyes’ (someone who wears glasses), Veronica added three additional I’s to her first name to become Veronica With Four Eyes, or Veroniiiica).
Fonts don’t matter
Gasp. What if fonts aren’t so important? A brilliant read with practical tips to make your writing more dyslexia friendly, and easier for everyone to read. Why fonts don’t matter.
How to design for screenreader compatibility
An introduction to designing for screenreader compatibility, from Web AIM.
The controversy of accessible type
Many of us default to sans serif fonts, believing they are always more accessible for dyslexic readers. But research is mixed on whether sans serif fonts are better. In this excellent article about accessible type, Alex Chen explains why, and argues that Comic Sans could be the unsung hero of accessibility.
Hyperlinks
How to write accessible hyperlinks
Don’t say ‘click here.’ Hyperlinks need to be unique and descriptive. They need to:
tell you where they will take you, and
not have the same name (unless it’s a link to the exact same page).
I like WebAIM’s guide to writing hyperlinks.
Put hyperlinks at the end
If you can, put hyperlinks at the end of your sentence.
As the gov.au style guide says:
Links reduce readability because they are distracting. They also make it easy for users to click away before they have read all your content.
If it’s important for users to understand all your content, put links at the end of sentences.
If a link makes more sense at the start of a sentence, consider if everything in the sentence is essential.
Images
How to write better alt text
A guide to writing better alt text, by Daniel Göransson, a web designer with a vision impairment.
How to write image descriptions
I love Jess Oddi’s thoughts on how to write image descriptions, with wonderful examples of the difference between a basic, descriptive and expressive approach.
Overlays
A lot of accessibility overlays cause huge problems for users. In fact, they cause so many different problems that many people who use assistive technology choose to disable overlays. They really are that bad.
A fact sheet about overlays
A simple fact sheet about overlays.
Should I use an accessibility overlay?
You know what I’m going to say: it’s a no.
A great explainer from the a11y project on why you shouldn’t use an accessibility overlay.
Do away with overlays
Accessibility overlays tend to be deeply unhelpful. Accessible web urges us to do away with overlays.
Social media
Avoid special characters
Scope explains why special characters and unicode symbols aren’t accessible.
Accessible Social has a great video on why ASCII art isn’t accessible.
Accessible Social
Accessible Social is a fantastic, free resource hub for digital marketers, communication professionals, content creators, and everyday internet users who want to begin learning how to make their social media accessible for people with disabilities.
How to use emojis accessibly
A wonderfully clear guide to how to use emojis accessibly, by Ryan Tan.
Tips for making social media accessible
Some tips for making social media more accessible, from Toronto Metropolitan University.
Readability
Analyze My Writing
Analyze My Writing is an AI tool that checks lexical density (how descriptive your writing is), how common or uncommon your words are, and creates Cloze tests (those weirdly fascinating readability tests that take words out of a piece of text, to see if readers can guess what should be there).
Content Design London readability guidelines
"Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence." Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London. And here they are! These readability guidelines are a brilliant resource.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a great, free tool for simplifying and improving your writing.
Hemingway Editor
Paste your writing into Hemingway Editor. It highlights long sentences, complex words, passive voice and more, and shows you how to make your writing simpler.
How to write more accessible emails
Practical tips to help you write more accessible emails.
Brevity 500
Try Brevity 500, a game that challenges you to rewrite text making it shorter and punchier.
Explain Jargon
Explain Jargon is the Chrome Extension that helps you ditch jargon.
Simple words from Plain English
Want to swap complex words for short and simple ones? Plain English has a great list of alternative words (PDF).
Plain language explained
I love this from The Pudding. It’s an interactive story about plain language.
Readability calculator
There are a few ways to calculate readability.
I’m sceptical of readability calculations which merely look at the length of sentences and the numbers of syllables in a word. This doesn’t tell us much about readability.
You can use short words and short sentences, but they may not necessarily be clear, relevant, specific, understandable, actionable, relatable or useful to your audience.
So I would combine a readability score with your own scorecard, which reminds you to:
use words your audience understands
follow a clear structure
make it scannable
put important information first,
use an appropriate tone,
take your audience’s knowledge and experiences into account.
My favourite readability assessment is the Flesch-Kincaid readability system. Here’s a good free readability calculator.
Tools and simulators
Access guide
A wonderfully easy to read introduction to accessibility. This one’s primarily for designers (not copywriters), but it’s very user-friendly.
Contrast checker
Colour contrast is important, and quick to check. One of the easiest tools I’ve found is Web AIM’s colour and contrast checker.
Colourblindness simulator
I don’t often recommend simulators.
Simulators can never even come close to showing us what someone’s experience is like. Putting on a blindfold is not the same as being blind. And there are many ways to experience something. You can be blind and also have peripheral vision, or low vision, or night blindness, for example. And what about coexisting conditions, like dizziness, or also being Deaf?
As long as we remember simulators can’t come close to reality, they can help us cultivate empathy. This colourblindness simulator is useful when you just need to do a quick check that your colour choices aren’t disabling anyone.
Creating accessible PDFs
I have a very low opinion of PDFs. They are often incredibly inaccessible. Even the most accessible PDFs are - in my opinion - a bit rubbish. But if you need to make a PDF, follow these steps to make your PDF as accessible as possible.
JAWS
JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is the world’s most popular screen reader. It provides speech and Braille output for popular programs and apps.
PDF Accessibility checker
The freeware program PAC provides a fast way to test the accessibility of PDF files.
The accessibility project
A phenomenal resource. The a11y Project (a11y is a numeronym or shortcut for accessibility) has an enormous range of resources, on every aspect of accessibility.
seizure risk checker
The Trace Center’s Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) is a free, downloadable resource for developers to identify seizure risks in their web content and software.
Books
Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag. Available as a paperback and ebook from A Book Apart, and as an audiobook on Audible.
Podcasts
Some of my favourite podcasts about accessibility.
A11y talks
https://www.youtube.com/c/accessibilitytalks
A11ycasts
A11ycasts (short for AccessibilityCasts) teaches developers how accessibility works all the way down at the platform level, while also demonstrating real world accessibility problems and solutions to fix them.
13 Letters
13 Letters is an accessibility podcast, brought to you by Be My Eyes. Learn about universal design, ADA, inclusivity and digital accessibility best practices from respected industry professionals.
The title refers to the word accessibility, which has 13 letters.