This is our guideline to achieve a bare minimum standard of having an accessible website. Test your project against the following requirements and remedy any issues prior to publication. Choosing to not meet any requirements should be done rarely and only with valid reasons.

A more comprehensive and suggested approach is to use a combination of the A11y WCAG checklist and Chartability workbook.

Must Haves

1. Content passes audit tool

While automatic auditing tools don't catch all accessibility issues, they're a great place to start. To test this: Use either Axe (recommended), Wave, or Lighthouse to conduct an audit of your story.

Meeting this requirement

• your tool of choice reports no major issues or warnings
• any persisting issues or warnings have been deliberately ignored for a valid reason
  • caveat: you can choose to use APCA in favor of WCAG for color contrast

2. All content is keyboard accessible

Not all internet users are using a mouse or touch screen device. We need to make sure that our content can be experienced if the user is using only a keyboard. To test this, only use your keyboard.

Meeting this requirement

• all interactive elements (i.e., links, buttons, search bars etc.) are accessible, function as expected, and can be navigated through in order of display

• focus states are visible when an element has been selected

• if a modal opens, the focus should automatically shift to inside the new content, and after being closed, the focus should return to whatever triggered the modal to open

• off-screen items (e.g., those in hidden drawers, closed modals etc.) should only be accessible by the keyboard when they are visible

• More Information