Physical Accessibility

Design Choices

Most considerations for physical accessibility in the digital space are a matter of making design and navigation choices. Consider the following principles as necessities:

1. Make buttons, links, and other interactive elements on a page (whether a webpage or LMS page) large enough to easily select or click. Try not to have anything that needs to be clicked and dragged to operate correctly.
2. Avoid tasks with time limits or limited response times to function correctly.
3. Make sure that a site or any other document is navigable without a mouse — that is, that you can get around, click links, perform tasks, etc. without having to use a mouse.

Alternate Navigation Options

Voice navigation and keyboard navigation are both ways to move around a website or other digital document. Generally speaking, if you have workable keyboard navigation and have actual text rather than images of text, voice navigation options will likely work.

Keyboard Navigation

When working with most website builders or LMS pages, and using actual text (rather than images of text), a lot of navigation by keyboard is built in as a possibility and doesn’t require extra work. An e-blog post for a consultant company, Novacare, provides an overview of how to test a website for non-mouse navigation.^[1] However, it is pretty easy to test whether a page can be navigated without a mouse.

1. Unplug/disconnect a mouse.
2. Ignore the trackpad.
3. Reload the page (ctrl+r or cmd+r)

Then try navigating a page using the keyboard. Basic commands include:

• tab (forward through elements)
• shift+tab (backward through elements)
• enter/return to activate a button or follow a link
• spacebar to activate or toggle other buttons
• arrow keys to move around on the page

As you navigate using the keyboard, watch for the following characteristics:

• Is it clear which element is selected?
• Are there “keyboard traps” (places that you can get into with a keyboard but then can’t get out of)?
• Are pop-up windows and modals (such as cookie consent windows) navigable? (That is, do the modals automatically take the focus, or does the focus continue behind the modals?)
• Do “toggle” options work without a mouse?
• Are there elements that are pretending to be something else, preventing them from being selected properly?
• Is there a way to skip through large content blocks?

Again, most website builders include these characteristics automatically, but if your navigation fails in some way, you need to make sure that you find out why and rearrange or change the details, layout, or coding choices to work properly.