Courses / Accessibility for developers

Practical foundationsAbout 90 minutes8 practical labs

Accessibility for developers

Find and repair accessibility barriers in a real interface. Work with meaningful HTML, keyboard controls, readable information, form feedback, reflow and reduced motion.

Selected web accessibility principles, tested on supplied booking pages. The checks assess these exercises; they do not establish WCAG conformance or replace testing with people and assistive technology.

Fit a lab into a lunch break or stay for a spare hour. Progress is saved so you can come and go. Labs need a laptop or desktop; the outline is available on any device.

The entire course is free: every lab and a personal completion download. No account or purchase is required. Progress is saved in this browser. Clearing browser data will remove it.

A page people can use.Interactive practice
Structure, keyboard, forms and feedbackFree course

The curriculum

8 practical labs.
Decisions you can use.

Every lesson starts with a short principle and a page that needs work. You make the changes. The feedback tells you which relationships work and what to try next.

By the end, you can

  • Choose meaningful HTML and useful names
  • Repair a keyboard interaction and its focus
  • Communicate beyond colour
  • Preserve content at narrow widths and enlarged text
  • Connect field labels, errors and success feedback
  • Keep information available with reduced motion
  • Apply the method to a fresh booking interface

Basic HTML and CSS, and a little JavaScript. No prior accessibility or GSAP knowledge is required. Use a laptop or desktop with a browser window at least 1024px wide. Work at your own pace; there is no timer.

  1. 01
    Give the page a structure

    A page can look organised while offering little structure to someone navigating by headings or regions. In this workshop page, the apparent headings are paragraphs and the main content is a generic group.

    8 min
  2. 02
    Make names and alternatives useful

    An arrow, a link called “More” and an image filename all ask the reader to supply missing context. Useful names and alternatives explain the job an item does here.

    10 min
  3. 03
    Use it with a keyboard

    Someone booking a repair workshop needs to read what to bring, close the details and continue to booking. The current trigger works with a pointer, but is missing from the normal keyboard route.

    12 min
  4. 04
    Make information survive colour

    The session list looks restrained, but its faint text is hard to read and the coloured dots do not explain which session can be booked. Those are two separate problems.

    9 min
  5. 05
    Leave room to read and act

    A fixed width pushes this page beyond a narrow viewport. Its introduction is also clipped to a fixed height. Increasing the text size exposes why those choices can prevent someone from reading the whole message.

    10 min
  6. 06
    Help people finish the form

    The booking form has placeholders that disappear when someone types, a red border when something is wrong and a confirmation that changes only visually. The visitor has to work out what happened at each step.

    14 min
  7. 07
    Keep information when motion changes

    The ordinary confirmation slides into view when requested. The reduced-motion branch removes the entire message. The movement is gone, but so is the information someone needs to understand the result.

    10 min
  8. 08
    Repair a fresh booking flow

    Eastbank Library has a new room-booking page. Its longer content, room availability and booking-reference field change the details, but the inspection method still applies. Decide where the barriers are before adjusting the controls.

    17 min

Proper interaction.

Repair a live document, inspect its structure and state, operate real controls, submit fictional form details, and test narrow, enlarged-text and reduced-motion previews. Inspect the HTML, CSS and JavaScript behind each decision.

A completion record.

Pass the practical checks in each lab to download an optional personal completion record. It is created on your device, has no public verification page and is not an accredited qualification.

For you, or your team.

This course is free for individuals and teams. No account is needed. Progress is saved in this browser. Clearing browser data will remove it.

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