Accessibility
We aim to make our software accessible to the widest audience possible. Empowering all people to easily and successfully use our products requires taking an inclusive, accessible by design, approach to both product design and engineering.
Accessibility compliance goals
For all of Reckon’s web applications, we strive to achieve the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA level of compliance. This ensures:
- our products exhibit our core company values
- we are using internationally recognised standards for benchmarking accessibility compliance
- we are building our software using industry best practices
Best practices
Accessibility is for everyone.
- Accessibility is about ensuring equitable access to our applications for all people.
- This includes people with disabilities, and also has many other beneficial aspects such as accommodating a user’s personal preference or - temporary limitations, power users, and more.
- We practice Inclusive Design to make our applications accessible to, and easily used by, the widest possible audience, without the need for - special adaptation or specialised design.
- We follow web accessibility best practices such as semantic HTML and the proper use of ARIA to ensure robust support for Assistive Technologies.
Accessible by design
An accessible by design approach means we consistently focus on these aspects of product design and development:
- Semantic markup with robust support for Assistive Technologies (ATs)
- Always use HTML5 tags semantically
- Use ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles and aria- attributes to provide Assistive Technology support, but only when necessary
- Use components from Balance to ensure maintainability across the entire application
- The focus order of elements within a page should be logical and intuitive
- Any important non-text content should be accompanied by a text alternative (alt-text)
- Simple and intuitive design
- An intuitive and logical design lends itself well to being developed semantically—consider the “outline” version of a page
- Experiences should not overwhelm users or behave in unexpected ways
- The experience should be functional using only a keyboard
- Considerate usage of color
- Color is never used alone to indicate meaning, such as validation errors or prompting user action
- Text and User Interface (UI) elements should have sufficient color contrast with their backgrounds
- Clear and concise copy
Resources
For a detailed look, check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Standards from W3C.