Today, in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we are launching accessibility.tools — a free toolkit built for designers who want to create more inclusive work.

When I joined Typotheque in 2021, the foundry was already deeply interested in user studies, so bringing on a cognitive psychologist only meant having more resources to conduct more empirical user research.

Carrying out each of these user studies required a lot of reading. Before designing an experiment, I’d have to dive deep into the literature to see what other researchers had done before. If we were interested in low vision, for example, we’d spend months reviewing what is known about glaucoma, cataracts and macular degeneration, reading what the scientific consensus is for effective design interventions.

These literature reviews were necessary, but they only served an internal purpose. Simultaneously, we frequently received well-intentioned questions about accessibility: Is there a font that helps people with dyslexia? What about people with myopia? We wanted to help, but we kept hitting the same wall: the academic literature is too dense to forward on, and we couldn’t find engaging sites that compiled it appropriately.

To bridge this gap, we decided to build a resource ourselves. We’ve called this Accessibility Tools, and it lives on its own standalone website. It is an independent, research-backed platform featuring two main pillars: thorough but accessible documentation, and practical testing tools.

For our first release, we’re launching extensive documentation on dyslexia. We chose to tackle this topic first because it is one of the most frequently discussed and questioned areas at the intersection between psychology and design.

Spearheaded by an exhaustive literature review conducted with cognitive psychologist Jeanne Gäßler, we created 40 short-form articles that compile over a hundred academic sources. These articles explore conceptual topics, such as how dyslexia is diagnosed (essential to understanding the complexity of this topic), but they also take a close look at the research on “dyslexia-friendly fonts”.

Alongside the documentation, we’re releasing a suite of simple, browser-based testing tools designed to help designers quickly evaluate their layouts for accessibility. These tools were developed in-house, and they leverage existing technologies, like OCR algorithm Tesseract and Gemini’s image vision to analyze specific parts of an uploaded image, and provide feedback on one specific accessibility feature.

So far, the toolkit features an Attention Heat Map, to see which parts of your design naturally draw the eye, a Contrast Analyzer to check legibility of your text/background colors, a Vision Simulator to preview how your design appears to people with different visual profiles, and an Alt-Text Generator that creates descriptive alternative text for images. Additionally, we’ve built a Demographic Calculator, which shows the relevance of inclusive design.

Earlier this year, we ran a comprehensive survey exploring how the design community approaches accessibility. With over 200 responses, the findings were consistent: designers find it hard to navigate the academic literature, and they often struggle to make the case for accessibility to their clients. These insights shaped the core functionality of this platform.

Beyond that initial survey, we have continually tested the platform’s usability directly with our target audience: working designers. To help us test the usability of the site, we brought on Matt Baxter, a Human-Computer Interaction researcher from the University of Leeds, who advised in the design process.

Additionally, we attended the Forum Without Borders conference in Poland in late January, where we had the chance to exchange ideas with the community and validate the direction of what we’re launching today. The full methodology behind the toolkit will be published in an upcoming peer-reviewed paper later this year.

A major issue I’ve found with other sites that compile accessibility research is that they are normally quite partisan. They often cherry-pick studies to support a specific narrative or use research that hasn’t been rigorously peer-reviewed. To ensure we don’t fall into the same trap, we’ve built this new resource with a commitment to rigor and editorial independence.

Although the site is maintained with the coordination of the foundry (since I am part of Typotheque’s team), our plan is to write the documentation with complete editorial independence from our design team. We’ve purposely collaborated with cognitive psychologists, rather than type or graphic designers, to author the documentation. This way, we ensure our views will be driven by evidence rather than design opinions.

In this effort to remain independent, we welcome future collaborations with other parties and foundries to write more documentation and build new tools. If you’d like to collaborate, please reach out at inbox@accessibility.tools.

And because we’d like this platform to be as useful as possible, everything on it is available under an open license (CC BY-SA 4.0). We invite others to take, edit, and re-publish our content if they find it useful.

We invite you to test the platform today. Click the link below to read through the available documentation on dyslexia and try out the new testing tools for yourself: Explore the toolkit at accessibility.tools