Digital Accessibility Fundamentals

Every piece of information valuable enough to be published on a document or webpage must be accessible to all readers.

Web accessibility ensures that people with disabilities have equal access to online information and services, which have become essential for daily activities such as voting, accessing health resources, and using public transportation information. Just as physical barriers can prevent access to buildings, inaccessible websites can exclude users with disabilities who rely on tools like screen readers, captioning, or voice recognition software to navigate the web. Poor website design can create unnecessary obstacles that make online content difficult or impossible to use, but these barriers can be removed by designing websites to be accessible for everyone.

Examples of website accessibility barriers are poor color contrast, lack of text alternatives on images, or posting information based only on color.  Whenever possible, create a webpage instead of linking to a PDF, since webpages are generally easier to make accessible and PDFs may not fully support accessibility features or may require additional steps to make them more accessible.