Accessibility
An accessible plugin, design or template supports accessibility personalizations by design and gives everyone a great user experience, regardless of their capabilities or how they use their Elgato devices.
Approximately one in seven people have a disability that affects the way they interact with the world and their devices. People can experience disabilities at any age, for any duration, and at varying levels of severity. For example, situational disabilities — such as a wrist injury from a fall or voice loss from overuse — can affect the way almost everyone interacts with their devices at various times.
Best practices
Design with accessibility in mind. Accessibility is not just about making information available to people with disabilities — it’s about making information available to everyone, regardless of their capabilities or situation. Designing your product with accessibility in mind means prioritizing simplicity and perceivability and examining every design decision to ensure that it doesn’t exclude people who have different abilities or interact with their devices in different ways.
Simplicity — Enabling familiar, consistent interactions that make complex tasks simple and straightforward to perform.
Perceivability — Making sure that all content can be perceived whether people are using sight, hearing, or touch.
Support personalization. With minimal additional effort, you can design your product to support the accessibility features people use to personalize the ways they interact with their devices.
When you use standard components to implement your interface, text and controls automatically adapt to several accessibility settings, such as Bold Text, Larger Text, Invert Colors, and Increase Contrast.
Audit and test your product for accessibility. An audit examines every element in your experience and gives you a comprehensive list of issues to fix. Testing helps you ensure that everyone can complete the most important tasks in your product, no matter how they interact with their devices.
When you test important user flows with accessibility features turned on, you gain an appreciation for the challenges of interacting with a device in different ways. You also discover places where your product might fail to deliver a great user experience.
For example, a common user flow in a social media plugin might be “post a comment” The tasks that make up this flow could include:
- Read posted comments
- Choose a comment for a response
- Open the response view
- Edit the response
- Post the response
For each critical user flow in your product, turn on an accessibility feature, such as voiceover, reduced motion, or large text size, and make sure that you can complete every task in the flow without difficulty. After you fix the problems you uncover, turn on a different accessibility feature and run through the user flow again.
Interactions
Assistive technologies like VoiceOver, and accessibility features like display accommodations, expand the ways people can interact with their devices. Because these technologies and features integrate with system-provided interactions, it’s essential that you support the system interactions correctly in your app.
Buttons and controls
Give all touchscreen controls and interactive elements a hit target that measures at least 44x44 pt. People with limited mobility need larger hit targets to help them interact with your product. It can be frustrating to interact with too-small controls in any platform, even when people use a pointer.
Use a consistent style hierarchy to communicate the relative importance of buttons. When you use a consistent hierarchy of button styles, people can grasp the importance of buttons based on their appearance. People can also turn on Button Shapes to make it easier to distinguish active buttons from surrounding content.
Consider giving links a visual indicator in addition to color, such as an underline. It’s fine to use color to identify a link, but if you use it as the only indicator, people — such as those with color blindness or cognitive or situational attention impairments — may not be able to perceive the distinction.
Text display
As font size increases, keep text truncation to a minimum. In general, aim to display as much useful text in the largest accessibility font size as you do in the largest standard font size. Avoid truncating text in scrollable regions unless people can open a separate view to read the rest of the content.
Consider adjusting layout at large font sizes. When font size increases, inline items and container boundaries can crowd text, making it less readable. For example, if you display text inline with secondary items — such as glyphs or timestamps — the text has less horizontal space. At large font sizes, an inline layout might cause text to truncate or result in overlapping text and secondary items. In this case, consider using a stacked layout where the text appears above the secondary items. Similarly, multiple columns of text can become less readable at large font sizes because each column constrains horizontal space. In this case, consider reducing the number of columns when font size increases to avoid text truncation and improve overall readability.
Increase the size of meaningful interface icons as font size increases. If you use interface icons to communicate important information, make sure they are easy to view at larger font sizes, too.
Maintain a consistent information hierarchy regardless of the current font size. For example, keep primary elements toward the top of the screen even when the font size is very large, so that people don’t lose track of these elements.
Prefer regular or heavy font weights in your app. Consider using Regular, Medium, Semibold, or Bold font weights, because they are easier to see. Avoid Ultralight, Thin, and Light font weights, which can be more difficult to see.
Ensure your product responds correctly and looks good when people enable bold text. People may turn on the bold text accessibility setting to make text and symbols easier to see. In response, your product should make all text bolder and give all glyphs an increased stroke weight. The system fonts and symbols automatically adjust to the bold text accessibility setting.
Make sure custom fonts are legible. Custom typefaces can sometimes be difficult to read. Unless your product has a compelling need for a custom font, such as for branding purposes or to create an immersive gaming experience, it’s usually best to use the system fonts. If you do use a custom font, make sure it’s easy to read, even at small sizes.
Avoid full text justification. The whitespace created by fully justified text can create patterns that make it difficult for many people to read and focus on the text. Left justification — or right justification in right-to-left languages — provides a framing reference for people with learning and literacy challenges, such as dyslexia.
Avoid using italics or all caps for long passages of text. Italics and all caps are great for occasional emphasis, but overuse of these styles makes text hard to read.
Color and effects
Don’t rely solely on color to differentiate between objects or communicate important information. If you use color to convey information, be sure to provide text labels or glyph shapes to help everyone perceive it.
Prefer system colors for text. When you use system colors in text, it responds correctly to accessibility settings such as Invert Colors and Increase Contrast.
Avoid using color combinations as the only way to distinguish between two states or values. Many colorblind people find it difficult to distinguish blue from orange; other problematic combinations are red and green, red and black, and either red or green combined with gray. When it makes sense to use a combination of colors to communicate states or values, include additional visual indicators so everyone can perceive the information. For example, instead of using red and green circles to indicate offline and online, you could use a red square and a green circle. Some image-editing software includes tools that can help you proof for colorblindness.
Ensure your views respond correctly to Invert Colors. People can turn on Invert Colors when they prefer to view items on a dark background. In the Smart Invert mode of Invert Colors, images, video, and full-color icons (such as app icons and nontemplate images) don’t invert, and dark UI stays dark. Test your product or design to find places where you might need to prevent an image — like a photo in a custom view — from inverting.
Use strongly contrasting colors to improve readability. Many factors affect the perception of color, including font size and weight, color brightness, screen resolution, and lighting conditions. When you increase color contrast of visual elements like text, glyphs, and controls, you can help more people use your product in more situations. In general, smaller or lighter-weight text needs to have greater contrast to be legible. Use the following values for guidance.
| Text size | Text weight | Minimum contrast ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 17 points | All | 4.5:1 |
| 18 points and larger | All | 3:1 |
| All | Bold | 3:1 |
Avoid requiring animations unless they’re essential for your experience. In general, let people use your product without relying on any animations (except design products).
Let people control video and other motion effects. Avoid autoplaying video or effects without also providing a button or other way to control them.
Be cautious when displaying moving or blinking elements. Although subtle movement and blinking can draw people’s attention, these effects can also be distracting and they aren’t useful for people with visual disabilities. Worse, some blinking elements can cause epileptic episodes. In all cases, avoid using movement and blinking as the only way to convey information.
Change blurring and transparency when people turn on Reduce Transparency. For example, make areas of blurred content and translucency mostly opaque. For best results, use a color value in the opaque area that’s different from the original color value you used when the area was blurred or translucent.