Who accessibility is for

Accessibility means people can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with your product regardless of disability. It is easy to picture a single kind of user, such as someone who is blind, but the range is much wider.

• Vision: people who are blind and use screen readers, people with low vision who zoom to 200 or 400 percent, and people with colour vision deficiencies.
• Motor: people who use only a keyboard, switch devices, voice control or a head pointer, and people with tremors who struggle with small targets.
• Hearing: people who are deaf or hard of hearing and rely on captions and transcripts.
• Cognitive: people with dyslexia, ADHD, memory difficulties or anxiety, who benefit from clear language, consistent layouts and forgiving forms.

Many limitations are temporary or situational. A broken wrist turns anyone into a one handed keyboard user for six weeks. Bright sunlight makes low contrast text unreadable. A noisy train makes captions essential. Designing for permanent disability usually improves the experience for these situations too.

Why it is a design and engineering problem

Most accessibility barriers are created early. A designer picks a pale grey for placeholder text, a developer builds a clickable div instead of a button, a content writer labels every link "Read more". None of these are hard to avoid when you know what to look for, and all of them are tedious to fix once they appear across a hundred screens.

What you will do in this course

You will learn the standard teams use to define accessible interfaces, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and a practical routine to test against it. We will work on a sample sign up and account settings flow that contains many common problems, so you can find and fix them yourself.

By the end you should be able to look at a design or a page and quickly spot the issues that would block real people, explain them clearly to your team and know how to fix them.