How Slickstream Prioritizes Accessibility

Site accessibility is extremely important for many reasons. Beyond the obvious necessity for those with disabilities, designing your site with accessibility in mind benefits people on mobile devices, those with slower connections, and makes it easier for search crawlers to make sense of your content. 

With that in mind, we have tried to make Slickstream components on your website as accessible as possible. Here's how we do it: 

Semantic HTML

HTML gives semantic meaning to every element. At Slickstream we try to use the right semantic HTML element for the right role. For example, one can attach a click handler to any element on the page, but using a <button> rather than a <div> lets the screen readers identify the role of the element easily. They can also infer the default label for the button.

ARIA

There are times when semantic information is not easily provided by the built in HTML tags, especially when creating more complex and interactive components. For such cases we provide attributes provided by WAI-ARIA specification to add the missing semantic information.

Alternative text for images

Slickstream provides appropriate alternative text for all images linking them to the titles of the corresponding pages.

Keyboard navigation and focus

One of the key features to make a site accessible is the ability to navigate the site using just the keyboard. We have made Slickstream’s search accessible by keyboard. When you tab through different controls on the page, each focusable component will visually indicate it has the focus. This is done by providing outlines, background colors, or by making the selected component stand out using shadows.