Summary: Follow Material Design's comprehensive accessibility guidance and supplement your learnings on this page to further understand best practices for designing for assistive technology.
Overview
When considering assistive technology, it's important to understand that most are really designed as output actions that control a device the same way that a keyboard, mouse, or touchpad does. This is also true for mobile devices. A device perceives a Switch, for example, as a keyboard pressing the Tab key. Or take Chrome Reading mode, which reformats the text into more readable typography. Designing experiences to support assistive technology helps to make our products more accessible.
Material Design and Products for All work closely to provide comprehensive accessibility guidance to Googlers. Visit Material Design’s Accessibility page to learn the most up-to-date guidance.
Products for All's assistive technology design guidance at a glance
A number of our accessibility best practices for assistive technology overlap, as you might see similar guidance across different devices. Designers can build a strong foundation of design knowledge, getting most of the way there by first thinking about designing for keyboards.
Clear affordances, targets and controls
There are a number of ways to ensure your interactions are clear. We've created a list of the top takeaways designing with clarity and persistence.
- Make controls persistent, especially in clusters of dense interactive elements
- Avoid timeouts so that users should be able to use controls without them disappearing
- Make clickable items sufficiently large
- Provide generous spacingExplicit dismiss and close buttons make interactions clear and efficient.
Environmental, ergonomic and situational considerations
Consider the needs of an individual. For many, the minimum font size and color contrast standards aren't enough.
- Font size and color contrast are a good starting point
- Consider the distance at which someone is using their device
- Improve readability with responsive layouts that support less density
- Consider designing for landscape mode to limit the times a user might need assistance while switching between apps
Navigation
As you will have learned after exploring Material Design’s Accessibility guidance, efficiently designed and labeled navigation is essential to ensuring your product works well with assistive technologies.
- Skip to content link on websites and apps help a user jump directly into the content by skipping the main navigation elements
- Back to top links on mobile and web lists and grids reduce the effort needed to navigate through long content
- Navigation alternatives like multi-level trees, tree tables with expand and collapse controls, search fields, Miller columns, menus, and filters reduce * reliance on scrolling and add hierarchy to information
- Search fields in an app, website, or list can allow assistive technology like Voice Access to find, tap, enter a query, and press search in any application