Announcing the Digital Accessibility Framework

28 April 2025

I’m really excited to announce the Digital Accessibility Framework (DAF). 18 months ago, a small group of people convened in Accessible Community to explore ways to expand our collective understanding of digital accessibility. The project is designed to forecast new accessibility requirements in emerging technologies and to help to discover accessibility requirements for user groups with which we are less familiar (e.g., hyperacusis, agraphia, aphantasia, etc.). Our findings could help develop digital accessibility guidance that arrives in time to be meaningful on new types of devices, and that addresses parts of the population that have not yet been able to contribute to accessibility guidelines development. More information about the background is available in the Accessible Community announcement.

During our initial incubation, we used a creative and agile process that involved challenging our own assumptions and knowledge, and considering and discarding many options. I worked most closely with Dr. Rachael Bradley Montgomery and Dr. J. Bern Jordan, with review from colleagues in the field. The framework is now ready for broader review, and we really hope to engage a lot of people across regions and industries. Beyond engaging with feedback on the model, we also want to stimulate new discussions in the accessibility industry and involve more people in maturing the work.

The framework is basically a multidimensional matrix whose intersections represent potential accessibility issues. At the moment, we are using three dimensions:

To develop these dimensions, we referred to the social model of accessibility, which considers an accessibility need as a limitation of the environment, not a characteristic of the individual. Our set of individual abilities addresses human variation, and our set of object characteristics address environmental affordances. These are linked by the support needed, which I describe more in a related article Design approaches derived from the normal curve. It took us a long time to settle on those particular dimensions, and what would be in each. We certainly still don’t have it perfect, but the framework is designed for us to be able to evolve its structure and content.

Currently the data for the framework is posted in a static DAF site. The landing page contains links to all of the lists described above, and individual items in the lists provide information about their relationships to other items in the framework. These primarily accessibility statements, which are simple statements of an individual characteristic and needed environment affordance. Each accessibility statement maps together one individual ability, one object characteristic, and one accommodation type, and there can be multiple such mappings. With those mappings, we can see related statements, and begin to see where some should exist that don’t yet.

The richest representation of this data is a table showing a three-dimensional matrix. Before looking at it, I recommend reading the brief description of the matrix first, then open the table from the “Current Draft Matrix” link). There are nearly 6000 cells in the table, representing the intersections of specific individual abilities, content characteristics, and support needed. At each of those intersections, accessibility statements that have been mapped to that intersection show up in the table cell. As we fill out the matrix, we can look at neighbouring intersections to explore related accessibility needs that could have been overlooked. Over time, we think this will help us to build a comprehensive model of the requirements for digital accessibility.

Most of the accessibility statements so far have been derived from published accessibility guidelines. This helps us to avoid “reinventing the wheel” when using the framework, but the real work is just beginning. We hope to use the matrix to broaden our collective understanding of digital accessibility, and use that to work for a more accessible future. We need to engage with many communities to bring their own understanding into our view of the set of dimensions we use, and what accessibility needs emerge from them. By “many communities” I mean people with various accessibility needs, but also people from different world regions, cultural contexts, languages, socio-economic statuses, etc.

Funding is a topic I do want to mention. The incubation phase of the Digital Accessibility Framework was partially supported by a NIDLRR grant but much of the design, content development, and tool development was unfunded, including my own contributions. We now have a project that promises to help advance the digital accessibility field, which will require greater participation and better tooling. If you are associated with an organisation whose mission might interest it in funding parts of this work, please get in touch!

Feedback can be provided on the comment form, in which you can provide thoughts about the framework, suggest specific content, or ask questions. In the data part of the site, there are also options to provide more specific feedback. As we get more engagement, we will expand the ways people can participate and contribute. Do reach out if you are interested in participating in or using this work in any way. The Digital Accessibility Framework is a great opportunity to advance our state of the art!