Accessible Icons: Definition and Importance for Accessibility

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Accessible Icons: Definition and Importance for Accessibility

Posted July 26, 2024

AudioEye

Posted July 26, 2024

A stylized e-commerce sites with several icons circled: a shopping cart icon in the upper-right corner and dollar sign icons over a row of t-shirts.
A stylized e-commerce sites with several icons circled: a shopping cart icon in the upper-right corner and dollar sign icons over a row of t-shirts.

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Designing accessible icons ensures they’re usable by individuals with disabilities. Below, we’ll discuss how to create accessible icons and the benefits they bring.

Navigate to any web page, and chances are it’s going to have at least one icon on it. Whether they’re material icons, graphical icons, email icons, decorative icons, fully custom, or ready-made, designers use icons extensively to visually represent information, capture attention, or drive action. 


Regardless of the type of icons you use in your web design, it’s important that they are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

Below, we’ll explore how to make icons more accessible to users with disabilities and their impact on the user experience and your business as a whole.

What are Accessible Icons?

Accessible icons are icons that are designed with accessibility features that make them more usable to people with various disabilities, including visual or cognitive impairments. These features ensure all visitors can understand, access, and use a page’s icons.

What are the Pros and Cons of Using Icons in Design?

Though icons are a highly popular design choice, their use has advantages and disadvantages.

Pros of Using Icons

  • Visual clarity: Icons can convey information or actions more quickly than text, making interfaces more intuitive and easy to navigate.
  • Space-saving: When used correctly, icons take up less space than text, allowing designers to create a cleaner, more sleek-looking design.
  • Universal recognition: Well-designed icons can be universally understood when they use common symbols, such as a trash can for deleting or a gear for setting.
  • Aesthetic appeal: Icons can give any web page a modern and polished look, adding to the overall aesthetic.
  • Improves user experience: Arguably, the biggest benefit of using icons is they improve the user experience by providing visual cues and simplifying context tasks.

Cons of Using Icons

  • Accessibility issues: Because icons are visual tools, they may not be accessible to individuals with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments such as blindness or low vision. 
  • Overuse: Too many icons or combining them with long text can make a page cluttered or confusing, especially for people with cognitive disabilities. 
  • Ambiguity: While some icons are universally recognized, others may not be, especially if they lack context or if the icon deviates from common understandings.
  • Design consistency: For a design to have a cohesive look, icons need to follow a consistent style and size, which can be difficult to maintain across pages.
An accessibility symbol on a stylized web browser, with seven icons of people facing the screen.

How To Create Accessible Icons

Making your icons accessible to people with disabilities isn’t as difficult as you think. It’s all about following accessibility best practices in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 

Below are a few things to remember when designing icons to increase accessibility.

Ensure Accessibility with Keyboard and  Assistive Technologies

People with disabilities typically use alternative methods when interacting with digital content, including keyboard commands or shortcuts and assistive technologies like screen readers. You’ll want to ensure icons are screen reader and keyboard accessible as it makes your site more user-friendly. Including descriptive text or ARIA labels can increase compatibility and improve icons' overall usability.

Use Alternative Text

Because icons are highly visual, users with visual impairments may be unable to see them. Alternative text or alt text (written descriptions of an image or icon) ensures screen readers can describe their purpose and what they look for those who are visually impaired. Concise, descriptive alt text provides valuable context into an icon’s function, like ‘Save’ for a floppy disk icon.

Clear Visibility

Ensure icons are clearly visible on a page by utilizing white space, keeping text to a minimum, and following accessibility guidelines for color contrast and icon size.

Color Contrast

An icon’s color contrast — how much contrast they have against their background — majorly influences how readable they are to users with low vision or color blindness. The higher the contrast, the easier it is for users to distinguish the icon from other elements. WCAG recommends a minimum color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 to improve readability. 


Use a color contrast checker to see if your icons meet accessibility requirements regarding color. AudioEye’s Color Checker, for example, can determine whether the color combinations you’re using have enough contrast.

Size in Pixels

Icons should also be in a size that makes them easily identifiable to users. WCAG recommends a minimum length of 24x24 pixels to ensure they’re large enough to be seen and easily clickable. Larger icons also make it easy for users with motor impairments to interact with them or those on mobile devices.

Standard <img> Elements

Use the standard HTML <img> tag for each of your icons. Doing so makes it easier for screen readers to describe the icon to users with visual impairments. You can add an ‘alt’ attribute to the <img> tag to include a brief description of what the icon represents. For example, if you have a shopping cart icon, the alt text could be “Shopping Cart”, telling screen readers what the icon's purpose is to users who rely on them.

Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable vector graphics (SVGs) are resolution-independent. More simply, SVGs can scale without losing their quality. Including SVG icons on your digital content allows users to zoom in or out of the page without losing quality.

Icon Fonts

Icon fonts allow you to include icons as text characters, which can be styled and scaled easily. Using ARIA labels and proper keyboard focus management makes these design elements more accessible.

Image Maps

Image maps are clickable areas within an image that take users to a different destination. These features should be used sparingly and include proper alt text and ARIA labels so screen reader users can understand and interact with various areas within the image.

Text Alongside Icon

Including text alongside icons helps users better understand their purpose. This is particularly helpful for users who might have difficulty understanding icons alone or those who use screen readers. It also helps those with cognitive disabilities by providing additional context to the icon and explaining why it’s on the page.

Consistency

Finally, be sure to maintain consistency in the design and usage of your icons. Doing so helps users become more familiar with the meaning of your icons and how you use them. Additionally, consistent icons help to reduce confusion and improve the overall user experience by making your web content more predictable and easier to navigate.

An accessibility symbol inside of a heart that has a rainbow gradient.

Why Should Icons Be Accessible?

Roughly 1.3 billion people worldwide have a disability. If you’re using icons to portray information or drive action and they’re not accessible, a huge portion of your audience is missing valuable information. This could also mean you’re missing out on potential revenue opportunities or losing customers to your competitors. 

Designing accessible icons also helps you better comply with accessibility laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the European Accessibility Act (EAA), and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). Each of these laws requires digital content, which includes icons, to be accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities. Enhancing accessibility around these elements lowers the chances of facing legal consequences such as lawsuits or demand letters that can get expensive.

Ultimately, when icons are perceptible, operable, and understandable, they create digital environments that are more inclusive and respectful to users’ needs. The result: a better, more inclusive experience for all users.

Let Experts Make Your Icons (and Website) Accessible

Icons are a great design tool — they add to the overall appearance of a page and help communicate information. The key: using them thoughtfully and consistently across your site and ensuring they’re accessible to all users, particularly those with disabilities. 

To help you test the accessibility and usability of your icons, there’s AudioEye. We start with our free Website Accessibility Checker, which scans your digital content — including your icons — to identify common accessibility issues. Our team of experts then takes a deeper look into your content to find more complex accessibility barriers and provide recommendations for remediation. 

With AudioEye’s Developer Tools, you can design and develop accessible icons early in your processes. You can test the function of your icons in a secure environment to ensure components are accessible before they impact your users. 


Ready to get started on your path to a more accessible design? Get started by entering the URL of your digital content in our scanner below. Or contact us to schedule a demo to see more of what AudioEye can do.

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