Ability Heuristics

A set of nine accessibility-focused design heuristics — Adaptability, Equitable Experience, Flexible Task Completion, Efficiency and Effectiveness of User Action, Multiple Modalities, Understandable Messages, Ease of Adoption, Ability Data Transparency, and Help, Support, and Community — developed by Mitchell et al. (2026) based on ability-based design. They are intended to let designers and developers without specialist accessibility training inspect interactive technology for accessibility problems, with an explicit emphasis on the quality of accessibility features rather than their mere presence or absence. Unlike WCAG checklists, the heuristics are platform-agnostic and organised to be memorable enough to hold in working memory during evaluation.