What's the A11y toolkit?

The A11y toolkit is an open source collection of techniques to avoid the most common accessibility failures. The A11y toolkit started as a community project at Thoughtworks Opens in a new window and later was launched as an open source project to help other to build better products for more people.

The inspiration for the A11y toolkit came from the WebAim Million report Opens in a new window . Since 2019 WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) conducts this yearly accessibility evaluation of the homepages for the top 1,000,000 web sites.

The report consistently shows that most homepages have accessibility failures (95.9% in 2024) and that most failures belong to five categories: Low contrast text (81%), missing alternative text for images (54.5%), missing form input labels (48.6%), empty links (44.6%), empty buttons (28.2%) and missing document language (17.1%). Which is great news, because all of them are really easy to fix.