Overview

Accessible design enables users with diverse abilities to navigate, understand, and enjoy a UI

Principles · Assistive technology

Accessibility & Material Design

Accessibility by default is a core design value for Material. Material's accessibility requirements and goals are documented across component pages and guidelines. Understanding your product’s accessibility can enhance usability for all users, including those with low vision, blindness, hearing impairments, cognitive impairments, motor impairments, or situational disabilities (such as a broken arm).

Accessibility standards are built into Material components, providing a foundation for inclusive product design. Anticipating a wide range of human experiences and disabilities prevents costly redesigns, reduces tech and design debt, and conserves resources upfront.

Principles for accessible design

The following principles for accessible design are approaches that can help anticipate, include, and respond to the needs of individuals. They're considerations for design, development, collaboration, and co-creation that encourage inclusive and equitable outcomes.

Honor individuals

Universal default experiences rarely meet everyone’s needs. Introducing customizable features in a default experience allows room for individual adaptation. Honoring the shifting needs of any person can mean giving more freedom to choose things for themselves.

Because a person's experience throughout their day, or year, or life can continue to change, it helps to support varying preferences and choices that allow individuals to address how their changing conditions, individual knowledge, and varying needs are met.

Learn before, not after

Before defining solutions, invest time in understanding the needs of users with a wide range of abilities and life experiences. Formal and informal research can open new ways of thinking, reduce biases, and encourage creative ways to make access available, especially to those who fall outside prevailing norms.

Accessible design processes anticipate as many potential product or experience outcomes as possible upfront. When user problems do arise, exploring the unanticipated outcomes can become a research foundation for learning, adapting, and recovering thoughtfully.

Requirements as a starting point 

The minimum requirements established by WCAG support specific human needs. However, these requirements can produce creative solutions with broad benefits.

History has shown that features originating from responses to specific access needs (dark mode, text-to-speech, speech-to-text) are a result of creative problem-solving within specified constraints. Seeing the requirements as opportunities, rather than constraints, has been shown to lead to solutions that ultimately serve many.