What is the Accessibility Developer Guide (ADG) website?

The Accessibility Developer Guide (ADG) is a free learning resource for developers and designers who want to build fully accessible websites. Its content is based strictly on the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), and it is maintained by the "Accessibility Alliance" — a group formed from years of hands-on accessibility testing and fullstack web development experience. If you are looking for practical, standards-aligned guidance on designing, implementing, and testing accessible websites, this site is aimed at you.

What the site covers

The ADG positions itself as a guide to "the simplest and most effective best practices" for accessibility work. Its material falls into a few recurring categories:

• Knowledge articles — conceptual explanations of accessibility topics. For example, the site covers skip navigation links (also called jump links) as a proven way to improve keyboard navigation, letting keyboard users jump straight to main content instead of tabbing through long headers on every page.
• Examples — concrete, implementable patterns. Documented examples include skip links (usually the first interactive element on a page, visually hidden by default and appearing on keyboard focus), accordions (content panels that expand or collapse vertically), and tablist widgets (tabs that divide complex page content into smaller sections, showing one panel at a time).
• Setup and testing guidance — practical environment configuration for accessibility testing. One documented entry covers configuring VMware Fusion on macOS to run Windows as a virtual machine, aimed at making accessibility testing on macOS more comfortable.

Who it is for

The guide targets people who design and implement websites, not just auditors. The stated goal is to help you design, implement, and test with accessibility in mind — so the content spans from conceptual understanding through to working code and verification practices.

Standards basis

All ADG content is based strictly on WCAG 2.1. That matters if you need your work to map to a recognized conformance standard rather than to ad-hoc advice, since WCAG 2.1 is the reference point the site builds on.

Maintenance and currency

The site shows recent changes with dates and named contributors, which gives you a way to judge how actively it is maintained. Documented entries include:

The presence of a "Recent changes" section and dated entries means you can check whether a topic you care about has been touched recently before relying on it.

When to use it — and when not to

Use it when you want WCAG 2.1-aligned, practice-oriented guidance with concrete examples, and you value content written by people who test real websites rather than purely theoretical documentation.

Be aware that the guide is a curated best-practices resource, not the standard itself. For formal conformance decisions, the authoritative source remains the W3C's WCAG 2.1. The ADG is best treated as a practical companion to that specification.

The site also references the European Accessibility Act (EAA) as a key piece of EU legislation harmonising accessibility requirements across member states — useful context if you work on products sold or operated in the EU, though the legal details themselves should be checked against official sources.