Faster accessibility answers with Gemini

Context

Accessibility work runs on constant judgment calls and trade-offs. As it occupied more and more of my time, I noticed a bottleneck in my workflow: when facing doubts or potential accessibility trade-offs, I would have to scour the WCAG guidelines to look for answers.

The thing is, even when I found those answers, I couldn't always shake off the uncertainty. So I built a Gemini Gem: a grounded, citation-first accessibility consultant I could actually trust… Because it would reference sources I already trusted.

Setting my Gem up

A RAG-like setup

I wanted this Gem to work more like a RAG setup, pulling directly from a few trusted sources. To do so, I fed it four core documents: WCAG 2.2, the WCAG Checklist for Mobile, Mobile Web Application Best Practices, and the W3C's Mobile Accessibility guidance.

Gem constraints

I then built in some constraints (what AI-savvy people would call guardrails). The most important was very simple: "No citation? No answer". In essence, I instructed my gem to substantiate any advice with specific guidelines to avoid hallucinations. This meant each AI reply would contain a direct quotation of the source material, which I would then be able to track, down to exact pages and paragraphs.

I also wanted to bake in as much honesty as possible. To achieve this, I kept the Gem's personality deliberately flat: objective, not persuasive. And I instructed the Gem to acknowledge the limits of its knowledge whenever it would run into grey areas, contradicting information, or insufficient data.

I did allow it to search beyond its core sources for questions the WCAG don't really touch on. One example that comes to mind are map-specific accessibility patterns.

The result: speed and confidence!

These days, this Gem is my first stop whenever I need a 2nd opinion on accessibility problems. It doesn't matter if it's a contrast question, a target-size check or a "is the focus order logical, or is the logic just in my head?" moment. Asking this "A11Y buddy" has fit right into my workflow, making me faster, more confident, and honestly? More passionate about accessibility than ever.

If you have any particular accessibility questions, or if you're just starting to learn about the topic, I encourage you to use the button below to have a go at it yourself! Please note: you will need to log into your own Gemini account to open the link 😉.