Sometimes, design requirements mean that you need to create an interactive element from a base <div> element or a custom element like <my-button> rather than using a native HTML element.

Your element will not be accessible by keyboard unless it is included in focus order and it can be activated using the ENTER and SPACE keys.

Visually indicating which element has focus is important for effective keyboard navigation. It's also important to ensure that only those elements that are available visually for interaction are focusable. If an active element is intended to be unavailable in a particular state and it’s hidden from view, it should not be able to receive focus.

Having to tab through invisible controls to reach visible ones is arduous and potentially confusing for sighted users navigating the page by keyboard. Also, screen-...

Links (<a> elements) are focusable by default, so it should normally be possible to activate them using the keyboard. However, under certain circumstances, they are not focusable: Unless you are deliberately trying to "disable" a link, make sure it does not take the form of any of these examples.

Descriptive labels help users understand the purpose of a form control. Labels should be associated with their controls so that when the input is focused, the label is announced by screen readers.

Landmarks help assistive-technology users navigate to and between areas of a page, and they improve the efficiency of in-page navigation.

Landmarks are to sections what continents are to countries—they help break the interface up into a few large, semantically distinct areas such as headers, footers and navigation blocks. The main landmark defines the unique content of the page: the most likely reason a user visited the page in the first place.

The heading levels (1-6) are often considered a way of describing and determining the “importance” of a heading, with h1 being the most important. This might be reflected in the visual appearance of headings—higher-level headings typically appear as bigger and bolder text than lower-level headings.

But you can't just put an “important” heading anywhere. Its heading level relates to how much content it refers to, and that has to do with structure.

Reflecting structure accurately allows screen-reader users to use their screen reader's heading-navigation feature to navigate by heading level, building up an idea of document structure. It also ensures that, for people who use custom stylesheets, heading structure is preserved even when the appearance of headings is changed.... Read more about ✎ Technique: Heading structure

For a readable interface, it's important to use visual cues to group or separate content to show which content relates to other content. This makes content easier to read, especially for people who have difficulty reading on-screen content and people who use screen readers.

When grouping content visually, you must make sure that you're not skewing the source order and breaking up the same content for screen-reader users.

When positioning elements using CSS, it's possible to place them in a position that does not reflect their location in the source order. This can have unexpected side effects for keyboard-navigation users.

Icon fonts are a popular and effective method for providing scalable symbols that can be used to label controls and provide graphical information. The information provided by icons also needs to be available to people who can’t see them.

The most appropriate alternative text for an image depends very much on the context of the image in question. You must provide information for that image that takes into account its purpose and also the surrounding text on the page. The same image might need different alternative text depending on how it's used.... Read more about ✎ Technique: Writing alternative text

People differ in the way that they can (or like to) consume information, especially in educational contexts. Some people might prefer information provided in text, or video, or audio; and their accessibility needs can also influence their preferences.

But while accessibility for images often focuses on providing a text alternative for screen-reader users, we can also look at the issue from the other way around—providing a graphic alternative for text to make the underlying information or concept easier to...

Each image requires alternative text that is equivalent to the information it conveys, unless the image is purely decorative and provides no useful information. So you need to be careful about what value you give the alt attribute.