Accessibility Assistant

About this plugin

The Accessibility Assistant lets you add Figma native annotations to mark up accessibility for interactive elements, headings, images and landmarks of desktop, website, and mobile applications, and also provides checklists and notes to review designs for accessibility before you spec. Share these annotations with designers, and then share the spec with engineers as part of your design. Accessibility is critical for good design. Making your designs accessible makes them easier to use for everyone. Our plugin addresses a very specific corner of accessibility. As designers, we often think about accessibility visually, in terms of color contrast, type readability, etc. This plugin addresses accessibility for keyboarding and screen reader software. It helps designers and engineers create a plan for how their product will interact with this technology so that screen readers can communicate properly with their users.

Annotating the focus/tab order for your designs is critical for accessibility

To create websites and applications that are inclusive and accessible to everyone, the designs that you create need to be device independent, which means that anyone can interact with your designs regardless of whether they’re using a mouse, keyboard, touch, gaze, or voice.

With this plugin you can

• Add Figma native annotations over your design including headings, landmarks, and images

• Bulk add, remove, reorder, and update your annotations

• Create multiple annotation sets

• Annotations are stored in the Dev Mode layer so no longer fill up your drawing layers

• Accessible Design checklists based on the UI Tenets “Understandable”, “Efficient” and “Habituating”

Learn more about the plugin and accessibility best practices

Walk through the tutorial for this plugin. To learn more about accessibility for the web visit w3.org. Check out the WAI-ARIA patterns for the most common elements you’ll use https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/. Learn how to write web content that is more accessible to people with disabilities https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/writing/.

This plugin is brought to you by Microsoft

Special thanks to the following individuals for their contributions:

• HCL: Swati Aggarwal, Divyanshu Dwivedi, Abhishek Konnur, Animesh Mishra, Abhishek Rai, Ashish Singh, and Ganji Srikanth.

• GitHub: Carie Fisher

• Microsoft: Anna Cook, Clint Covington, Michael Fairchild, Andrea Fowler, Kelly Gorr, Aaron Gustafson, Manika Malhotra, Christina Mallon, Emily McLean, Mallika Meiyappan, Scott O’Hara, David Snow, Dima Steiteyeh, Jackie Tidwell, and Ben Truelove.