Sensory Characteristics

This guideline ensures that items on a web page are referenced in ways that do not depend on whether people can perceive shape, size, location or orientation.

It is not enough to write, “Click the round button” or “See the list on the left”, or to use graphical text characters (glyphs) to convey meanings that may not be obvious to a user of assistive technologies.

Ensure that people get the same meaning from web page content, even if they cannot perceive shape, size positioning, or orientation such as left and right.

Tools required

Web Developer extension

How to test

1. Open the web page to be tested.
2. Scan the content for references that require sensory capability to understand, such as references to size, shape or position. Check that the information can be understood or acted on without the sensory capability required.
3. Scan the content for graphical symbols that convey information, e.g. a checkmark. Check that the symbol’s meaning is provided in some way other than its shape, size, position or location, for instance, as text on the page or, if it is an image, in an alt attribute.