Adding an accessibility page to your repository

Add an ACCESSIBILITY.md file to make your project's accessibility information easy to find and give people a clear way to report barriers.

In this article

When a repository contains an ACCESSIBILITY.md file, GitHub displays an Accessibility tab on the repository overview and links to the page from the repository's About section.

GitHub looks for the file in the .github directory, the repository root, and the docs directory, in that order. If the repository does not contain an accessibility page, it can inherit one from a repository named .github that is owned by the organization.

An accessibility page can describe your project's accessibility priorities, supported environments, known barriers, contributor expectations, reporting process, ownership, and maintenance.

Adding an accessibility page from Community Standards

For a public repository, you can start with the accessibility page template.

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Insights.

    Screenshot of the main page of a repository. In the horizontal navigation bar, a tab, labeled with a graph icon and "Insights," is outlined in orange.

  3. In the left sidebar, click Community Standards.

  4. Under "Additional community file," find "Accessibility," then click Add or Propose.

  5. Replace the instructions in the template with accessibility-related information for your project. The instructions are stored in comments and do not appear when GitHub renders the file.

  6. Click Commit changes...

  7. In the "Commit message" field, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see Creating a commit with multiple authors or on behalf of an organization.

  8. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is the default branch, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request. For more information, see Creating a pull request.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a radio button to commit directly to the main branch or to create a new branch. New branch is selected.

  9. Click Commit changes or Propose changes.

Creating an accessibility page manually

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Above the list of files, select the Add file dropdown menu, then click Create new file.

    Alternatively, you can click in the file tree view on the left.

    Screenshot of the main page of a repository highlighting both the "Add file" and the "plus sign" icon, described above, with an orange outline.

  3. In the file name field, type ACCESSIBILITY.md. To store the file in the .github or docs directory, type .github/ACCESSIBILITY.md or docs/ACCESSIBILITY.md.

  4. On the Edit new file tab, add accessibility-related information.

  5. Click Commit changes...

  6. In the "Commit message" field, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see Creating a commit with multiple authors or on behalf of an organization.

  7. If you have more than one email address associated with your account on GitHub, click the email address drop-down menu and select the email address to use as the Git author email address. Only verified email addresses appear in this drop-down menu. If you enabled email address privacy, then a no-reply will be the default commit author email address. For more information about the exact form the no-reply email address can take, see Setting your commit email address.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a dropdown menu with options to choose the commit author email address. octocat@github.com is selected.

  8. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is the default branch, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request. For more information, see Creating a pull request.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a radio button to commit directly to the main branch or to create a new branch. New branch is selected.

  9. Click Commit changes or Propose changes.