Screen Reader 🖥 for web 🕸 and mobile 📱

On the web 🌎, if you are a Mac 🍎 user, you can turn on voiceover by using cmd+f5. You should turn on the screen reader very early in the development process to see how it will inevitably read the contents of your website. This will help create a better user experience and help ensure you use the right accessibility properties. Here is an example of how the above checkbox component will be read by the screen reader when voice over is turned on.

gif of an example VoiceOver for a checkbox

Checkbox component when then voice over is turned on

Accessibility checklist ✅

Below is a handy checklist ✔ on what should be considered when thinking of accessibility. This is a great start and serves as a solid reference point. It’s important to also keep in mind that there is more to accessibility than what is listed here. Here is the 🔗 link to this checklist.

Accessibility checklist

Accessibility checklist

Make Open-source 👐🏼 libraries more flexible or accessible

If you are an open-source developer, you can help promote 💪 accessibility by adding accessibility yourself, making your library manageable so that others can add accessibility properties themselves — or both 🙌🏼. This is very important as developers tend to use a lot of packages 📦 on our projects. This way, before we decide to code something ourselves, we can look for existing packages that will do the job for us.

If those packages aren’t flexible enough to inject properties, you can fork🍴 their repository and add accessibility properties yourself. However, this is a much more difficult option 😢 and takes a lot more time ⏰. Therefore it is our responsibility as open-source developers to make our packages more flexible.

I hope that after reading how you can get started with accessibility, you realize how important it is to consider it from the start — not as an afterthought. If you’re interested in learning more, check out one of my recent talks at React Europe, here: https://youtu.be/X_3tnSwXLls

Please give it some 👏 if you liked it 🙏 and share your experience in the comments below.