Digital Accessibility Tools & Resources

Federal Resources

• Section508.gov: Create Accessible Digital Products - practical techniques for creating content that meets accessibility compliance standards
• Federal Plain Language Guidelines - practical techniques for writing in plain language, which supports accessibility compliance --especially for people with cognitive disabilities-- and better serves the target audiences

Industry Guides

• AccessAbility 2: A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design - best practices for implementing accessibility criteria in graphic design across print and digital media (free PDF download)
• Accessibility Fundamentals Overview - articles, videos, and user-stories to help with getting started on accessibility compliance
• Accessible Social - best practices for implementing accessibility criteria in social media content
• WCAG 2.1 Understanding Docs - explanations for people in non-technical roles to understand the criteria, the intent of the criteria, and ways to meet the criteria successfully

State of Minnesota Resources

Accessibility Training

• Microsoft Word - 7 modules
• Microsoft PowerPoint - 3 modules
• PDFs - 11 modules

State of Minnesota Experience Lab

• Cognitive - Skills that people use every day, like talking, typing, writing, or walking, become automatic, and rely on the brain’s implicit muscle memory. This memory is largely unconscious but very important in completing everyday tasks without spending lots of effort thinking about how to interact with the world. Some cognitive disabilities result because of changes to the brain - like those caused by traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) or strokes. They can cause impairments to these functions. Relearning these simple, implicit skills can be incredibly challenging.
• Motor - Mobility impairment is a broad category of physical disabilities that include upper limb and manual dexterity disabilities, loss of fine-motor control, and disabling conditions such as cerebral palsy and carpal tunnel syndrome. The disabilities may be temporary or permanent; they may range in severity from mild loss of fine-motor control to quadriplegia; they may be the consequence of aging, accident, heredity, disease. Users may have limited arm or hand movement, use just one hand, have a tremor, have difficulty with fine movements, or be unable to hold a mouse.
• Vision - Although it’s true that most blind people do have some degree of vision, for all intents and purposes, one can say that people who are blind do not use their eyes to access the web, because whatever vision they have is not useful enough for this kind of task. This means that a computer monitor and mouse would be much less useful to a person who is blind. It’s not that blind people are incapable of moving or clicking a mouse; it’s just that they don’t know where to move it or when to click it, since they can’t see what’s on the screen.  As a result, most blind computer users rely on the keyboard for navigation and key structural cues to understand the content.