Accessibility is an important part of all digital experiences — and at ServiceNow, we believe that everyone should have the opportunity to use our Platform and Products. What this means, is that we design with all backgrounds, abilities, disabilities, and various needs in mind to ensure that we can offer the most inclusive experience possible.

Thank you for coming to the Accessibility Leading Practices presentation and Designing for Accessibility pod at Knowledge 2023. Here is a list of resources and tools we know that you will enjoy, learn from, and use to improve the accessibility of your ServiceNow instances and implementations.

❗Important quick links

Accessibility Leading Practices presentation

This presentation (PDF is also located at the bottom of this article) covers how ServiceNow makes products accessible as a collective team, along with 6 leading practices and tools to help you be successful today.

Sign up to participate in ServiceNow accessibility research studies!

We want to ensure we are providing the best possible experience for all customers and ensure our products are accessible for everyone. To achieve this, we need your help to understand your ServiceNow experiences and needs. Research studies can range from 2 to 90 minutes, with compensation (if eligible). Learn more here or sign up now.

Design & Research Tools

Order your Accessibility cards

For the first time, ServiceNow is releasing our accessibility cards! These cards are to be used side-by-side with your organization’s personas (target users) and highlights major differences and solutions people with disabilities may encounter when interacting with digital experiences, along with listed solutions. This was created and driven by primary and secondary research, and can be used by anyone in your organization. Order here now to get your free cards shipped to your home (please enter your work email and use access code: a11y).

Design annotation templates

Our Figma accessibility design annotation template  (located in the ServiceNow Figma community profile) includes annotation options for labeling many common needs for accessibility. This includes color contrast, keyboard usage, alternative text, and even forced colors or Windows High Contrast Mode. This template can be used by designers, engineers, and quality teams to ensure everyone is on the same page for accessibility.

Color contrast automated checking tools

Ensuring appropriate contrast for your text and informational graphics is a fundamental requirement for accessible design. There are many online tools and plug-ins for testing and finding accessible color combinations. Here are some of our favorites:

• aremycolorsaccessible.com
• colorsafe.co
• WebAIM Contrast Checker
• Contrast plugin for Figma

Development Tools

Accessibility automated evaluative tools

Test automation tools can help identify potential accessibility issues in your content and to give you quick insight as to what changes you might need to make. These tools typically can find some of your accessibility defects (but not all). Here are some of our favorites:

• Axe DevTools Chrome extension
• WAVE browser extension
• Accessibility Insights
• Evinced
• ANDI

Base components via Next Experience Components

The ServiceNow Next Experience Component Reference is an amazing resource to learn about our components, their UI Builder configurations, Accessibility API properties, and usage guidelines. You can also configure our components live in the Component Playground. For highly customized components outside of this, you can use W3C’s ARIA authoring practices guide to help assist you.

Learning Resources

Community articles

Read more about some best practices and guidance for targeted ServiceNow products

• Service Portal: design guidelines
• Service Portal: best practices
• Knowledge: guide for writing accessible articles

Product Accessibility Conformance Reports 

Learn about how ServiceNow products are meeting accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These reports are available for the currently supported ServiceNow releases. View the accessibility conformance reports here.

ServiceNow’s Accessibility statement

Learn more about ServiceNow and its accessibility commitment.

More opportunities

Join the Accessibility Product Advisory Council (PAC)

This PAC is an annual program for a group of customer representatives selected to participate in a product-specific advisory board based on extensive accessibility knowledge. This is a unique opportunity to advice and influence accessibility of ServiceNow products through quarterly collaborative events. To join, please contact Tony Morales (tony.morales@servicenow.com)

Have accessibility questions? Contact accessibility_support@servicenow.com