Three Easy Steps to Make Your Product More Accessible

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD); a day of awareness intended to draw attention to accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities around the world. It is a perfect time to reflect on the importance of accessibility in the cloud. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), our guiding principle of customer obsession extends to our work in accessibility. We believe that cloud computing and other products should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.

For us, building inclusive digital experiences is about providing equitable experiences for all of our customers. In this blog post, we’ll cover what accessibility is, why it’s important, and what you can do to build accessibly with AWS. To learn more, visit the AWS Accessibility webpage.

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility is the practice of making digital experiences usable by as many people as possible. According to the World Health Organization, about 16% or 1.3 billion people globally have a disability. That means that a significant portion of the global population has a condition that affects how they live, consume content, create, etc. Disabilities can be apparent (e.g., someone who uses a wheelchair) or non-apparent (e.g., someone who has a traumatic brain injury).

Embedding accessibility throughout the product development lifecycle is key to ensuring as many people as possible can use your product. At AWS, we begin with design and consider things such as keyboard operability, color contrast, and what accessible labels may be required. We then annotate our designs with accessibility information for our engineering teams. Our accessibility experts work with our engineers as they translate the designs to code.

When an experience is built, we test it with automated and manual accessibility tests. But we don’t stop there. We also publish Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) which are documents that show how our services conform with accessibility standards. These ACRs are available to our customers through AWS Artifact, a central resource for security and compliance reports.

Organizations of any size can build accessible products. Here are 3 easy ways to help improve your product’s accessibility:

Run automated testing

Automated testing can catch many common accessibility issues such as color contrast, incorrect syntax, and accessible labeling failures. Automated tests commonly take one of two forms: browser plugin or build pipeline. There are many options for free browser plugins. These plugins, once installed, scan a page for accessibility and provide a report of issues. Accessibility checkers are available for most common test runners, such as Jest and Jasmine. They run accessibility checks as part of your build process and output a list of issues found in each scan.

Test manually with a keyboard

One of the easiest ways to improve accessibility is to test your product using keyboard navigation. Put away your mouse or trackpad and try to complete tasks in your software with only a keyboard. Can every button and link be reached? Are there any interactions that only work on hover or with the ability to drag and drop? Keyboard testing will help ensure users of assistive technology such as screen readers and/or those with motor disabilities can use your product.

Use an accessible design system

Design systems can do a lot of the work for you, but don’t just assume that a library is accessible because it is popular. Look for an accessibility statement and, if it is open-sourced, check to see if they are addressing accessibility issues. Cloudscape Design System built by AWS is a great choice for accessibility. Cloudscape is an open source design system that provides guidelines, patterns, demos, and components to help you create delightful experiences for your customers.

GAAD, every day!

Werner Vogels shared during his 2023 re:Invent keynote that accessibility is non-negotiable. At AWS, we believe that accessibility is everyone’s job and digital experiences will only be accessible if we all build with intention and care.

GAAD is a great time to start learning how to build accessibly. Happy GAAD and thank you for learning more about accessibility in the cloud! Please share this blog with your teams so that we can raise awareness together about building inclusive customer experiences.