Guidelines for Application Software Accessibility

The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design provides guidelines to cover application software running under any operating system or runtime environment. The guidelines consist of two main priorities for application software accessibility. Priority one aims to ensure that the application can be used by most people with impaired mobility, vision, hearing, cognition and language understanding, using their assistive technologies.  Examples of how to achieve this priority include: ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies, adhering to standard keyboard access methods, ensuring a logical tab order for controls, and providing accessible documentation, training, and support materials. The second priority aims to make software applications easier to use and include more people with cognitive impairments or multiple disabilities. This second priority can be accomplished through allowing sufficient response time to accommodate the slowest users, ensuring that the user interface is similar across different functions, adhering to the operating system user interface guidelines, and providing for users with multiple impairments.