Open Source Accessibility Framework

Make accessibility part of how your project works, one practical step at a time.

The Open Source Accessibility Framework helps open source projects turn accessibility goals into public, trackable progress. It provides phased actions for improving documentation, workflows, testing, and community practices without requiring projects to solve everything at once.

This is an improvement framework, not a certification, score, or ranking. The goal is sustained progress and accountability.

Get started

1. Track your project's progress in the accessibility framework. Your public tracking issue makes your accessibility journey visible alongside other projects using the framework, creating opportunities to share experience, offer mentorship, ask for help, and learn from one another.
2. Complete the Foundational phase.
   • Create an ACCESSIBILITY.md
   • Use an accessibility label to track relevant work
3. Complete the remaining phases in the order that best suits your project, updating your tracking issue as you finish each action.

Projects can work incrementally and adapt the actions to their size, maturity, and community needs.

Why adopt the framework?

• Start with clear, achievable accessibility actions.
• Build accessibility into existing project practices.
• Give contributors well-defined ways to help.
• Make progress and remaining barriers visible to users.
• Adopt improvements incrementally at a pace that works for your project.

Framework phases

Phase	Outcome
Foundational	Make the project’s accessibility commitment visible and establish clear reporting and tracking paths.
Workflow	Integrate accessibility into documentation, design, triage, pull requests, ownership, and dependency decisions.
Testing	Add repeatable automated and manual accessibility checks for core experiences and documentation.
Community	Respond to accessibility feedback, share progress, invite participation, and support accessible collaboration.

Follow progress

Explore participating projects and their public tracking issues on the Open Source Accessibility Framework project board.

Contribute

Want to help a participating project improve?

• Look for issues labeled accessibility and good first issue for beginner-friendly work.
• Look for issues labeled accessibility and help wanted where projects are actively seeking support.

To improve the framework itself, open an issue or pull request in this repository.

Framework maintainers can find operational guidance in Framework maintenance.

Sponsors