Welcome to Make Things Accessible

Hello and welcome

The Make Things Accessible website is a repository for guidance material and useful resources for organisations looking to improve their digital accessibility.

This project began as a shared effort between a number of London-based universities looking to pool our efforts and knowledge on delivering accessible experiences for students and staff. Make Things Accessible is continuing to grow with more contributors, turning this repository into a useful tool for everyone.

The guidance material found on this website is aimed to help you complete accessibility related tasks whether that be better understanding of accessibility regulations, including accessibility requirements into procurement, conducting basic accessibility checks, and many other topics.

Our guidance material is sorted into a number of ‘tags’ which can help you filter for relevant information. You can browse all material in the guidance section or filter for specific topics by selecting relevant ‘tags’.

If there are topics that we have not yet added but you think we should, something we have gotten wrong, or you want to contact us for any other reason please reach out.

Latest guides

Our latest digital accessibility guides are displayed in this section, this will be updated each time we produce a new guide, alternatively, you can view all guides.

Collaborations

Make Things Accessible is turning into a growing community of good practice. We are proud to collaborate and support projects which help spread support for digital accessibility.

Make Things Accessible is supporting projects like Access and Assistance for All (AAA) campaign to encourage education organisations to ensure learning is inclusive for all students, and the Accessibility Passport in partnership with the RNIB to improve accessibility standards in IT procurement.

Make Things Accessible are always open to new projects and have many more things in the pipeline. If you are interested in working with us on an accessibility project you want to share for the benefit of the community, get in touch.

Site preferences

Please feel free to display our site, your way by finding the preferences that work best for you. We do not track any data or preferences at all, should you select any options in the groups below, we store a small non-identifiable token to your browser's Local Storage, this is required for your preferencesto persist across pages accordion be present on repeat visits. You can remove those tokens if you wish, by simply selecting Unset, from each preference group.

Theming

Theme
Code block theme

Code theme help

Code block themes can be changed independent of the site theme.

  • Default: (Unset) Code blocks will have the same theme as the site theme.
  • Light 1: will be default for users viewing the light theme, this maintains the minimum 7:1 (WCAG Level AAA) contrast ratio we have used throughout the site, it can be quite difficult to identify the differences in colour between various syntax types, due to the similarities in colour at that contrast ratio
  • Light 2: drops the contrast for syntax highlighting down to WCAG Level AA standards (greater than 4.5:1)
  • Dark: Syntax highlighting has a minimum contrast of 7:1 and due to the dark background differences in colour may appear much more perceivable

Motion

Motion & animation

Motion & animation help

  • Default (Unset): Obeys device settings, if present. If no preference is set, there are subtle animations on this site which will be shown. If you have opted for reduce motion, smooth scrolling as well as expanding and collapsing animations will no longer be present, fading transtitions and micro animations will still be still present.
  • None: All animations and transitions are completely removed, including fade transitions.

Links

Underline all links

Underline all links help

  • Default (Unset): Most links are underlined, with a few exceptions such as: the top level links in the main navigation (on large screens), cards, tags and icon links.
  • Yes: Will add underlines to the exceptions outlined above, resulting in every link being underlined

Text and paragraphs

Font size (main content)

Font size help

This setting does not apply to the site's header or footer regions

  • Default (Unset): Font sizes are set to site defaults
  • Selecting Large or Largest will increase the font size of the main content, the size of the increase depends on various factors such as your display size and/or zoom level. The easiest way to determine which option suits you best would be to view this text after clicking either size's button
Letter spacing

Letter spacing help

  • Default (Unset): Default letter spacing applies
  • Increased: Multiplies the font size by 0.12 and adds the sum as spacing between each character
Line height

Line height help

  • Default (Unset): all text has a minimum line height of 1.5 times the size of the text
  • Increased: all text has a line height of twice the size of the text
Line width

Line width help

  • Default (Unset): all text has a maximum line width of 80 REM units (this averages around 110 characters per line)
  • Decreased: all text has a maximum line width of 55 CH units (this averages around 80 characters per line)
Paragraph spacing

Paragraph spacing help

  • Default (Unset): The space between paragraphs is equivalent to 1.5 times the height of the paragraph's text
  • Increased: The space between paragraphs is equivalent to 2.25 times the height of the paragraph's text
Word spacing preference

Word spacing help

  • Default (Unset): No modifications to word spacing are present
  • Increased: Spaces between words are equivalent to 0.16 times the font size