Making Notion Inclusive:
An Accessibility (A11Y) Assessment
TEAM
Peter Kaiser
Indrani Thool
WHAT I DID
Evaluated and provided feedback on the accessibility of 10+ screens.
DURATION
September - December 2024 / 3 months
SKILLS
Design Evaluation / Cognitive Walkthrough / UX Writing / UX Design
What is Notion? 🤔
Notion — Your beloved productivity tool for creating highly customizable workspaces
Notion is an all-in-one productivity tool for note-taking, task management, databases, and collaboration. Gaining popularity in 2018, it has become essential for students, professionals, and organizations, offering a flexible, customizable workspace for organizing information and managing projects.
Why did we evaluate Notion?
Designing interfaces within an interface: The nested layers of A11Y in Notion 🪆
Notion empowers users to create customized interfaces tailored to their needs. These interfaces can remain private, be shared with collaborators, turned into templates, or even published to a public URL.
This introduces a unique layer of accessibility: Notion must not only ensure its own platform is accessible but also encourage users to design accessible interfaces within it. Intrigued by this challenge, our team chose Notion as the focus of our accessibility evaluation.
What did we find?
14+ WCAG violations and 7+ pain points in evaluating basic Notion onboarding and getting started user flows
Using WCAG compliance evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs, we assessed Notion’s accessibility strengths and gaps.
Our evaluation revealed key WCAG failures in the desktop version, including issues with alt text, contrast, and tabbing—barriers for users with low vision or keyboard navigation needs.
Testing from the perspective of Lea, a user with fibromyalgia who relies on speech software, we found major usability challenges. Notion’s lack of clear tabbing guidance and reliance on cursor hovering made navigation difficult for assistive technology users.
What can we do about it?
Identify and solve key accessibility issues in Notion ✅
By combining WCAG evaluations with cognitive walkthroughs, we identified key accessibility gaps and user challenges. While WCAG assessments highlighted technical compliance issues, cognitive walkthroughs provided deeper insights into real user struggles. This approach allowed us to pinpoint problems and develop targeted solutions for the following accessibility issues:
01
Contrast
02
Resizing
03
Target Size
04
User Control
Creating a Tips for Accessibility in Notion page to encourage Notion users to design with accessibility in mind ⚡️🧑🧑🧒🧒
As discussed, Notion has a lot to improve in terms of accessibility. However, many existing accessibility features are still unknown to majority of Notion users. The Notion community can use these to make personalized public/collaborative pages accessible to everyone, and disabled users in our community can use these to access Notion more easily.
Therefore, we decided to create a Tips for Accessibility in Notion page that gives a brief overview of accessibility features that Notion currently offers and how users can implement them. These include features such as alt text, header hierarchy, keyboard shortcuts, Notion's integration with various assistive technology.
So how did I do it? Let’s start from the beginning!
Notion's stance on accessibility
Notion lacks transparency in its accessibility efforts
Our first step was to evaluate Notion's commitment to accessibility. However, we found no publicly available guidelines, documented efforts, or clear plans for improving accessibility. The only mention of accessibility we found from Notion was a single post on X (formerly Twitter) seen below.
The lack of transparency made it difficult to understand Notion’s priorities in this area and raised concerns about how accessibility is integrated into their design and development process.
Testing Notion’s accessibility
Surprisingly, Notion fails to meet key Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
As outlined above, we identified 14+ WCAG violations in our evaluation of Notion's basic onboarding and getting started tasks. The majority of these violations were at the A or AA level, which are minimum legal requirements for web interfaces.
As an avid Notion user myself, I was surprised to see that so many accessibility standards were not met. This highlighted an important lesson: even the best tools are ineffective if they aren't accessible to all users who wish to engage with them.
Stepping in the users’ shoes
In conducting secondary research from online forums about Notion’s accessibility, we found that many users were not happy
To learn more about how users, especially disabled users, perceive Notion’s digital accessibility, we gathered feedback from forums like Reddit. Some point out how Notion has changed its text contrast in the last three years and worsened the ratio. Others complain about the user’s lack of ability to manually adjust contrast or change the colorways beyond a light and a dark mode. Many others point out Notion's lack of compatibility with assistive technology.
This helped us understand the real-world challenges disabled users face when navigating Notion, highlighting key areas where accessibility improvements are needed.
A cognitive walkthrough with targeted personas revealed key accessibility barriers
A cognitive walkthrough identifies aspects of an interface that can be challenging to specific user while performing a set of tasks on the website.
We performed a cognitive walkthrough from the perspective of a persona named Lea, who deals with chronic fatigue and pain due to fibromyalgia and uses speech software like Dragon Naturally Speaking (or Voice Control, which we tested with).
We found that Lea may struggle with accidentally tabbing into editable text fields without a straightforward way to exit, as Notion doesn’t inform users about the ‘esc’ key to resume tabbing ability. Additionally, many interactive elements are only accessible via tabbing or Voice Control if the cursor hovers over them first, making them difficult to focus on with assistive technology.
Our deliverables
How do we communicate our research to raise awareness and have an impact?
With our research in hand, we brainstormed impactful ways to communicate our findings. We settled on the following deliverables:
01 A GUIDE TO NOTION'S ACCESSIBILITY
Outline our research in the form of a blog post to communicate our thoughts, findings, and potential solutions to Notion’s accessibility issues.
02 TIPS FOR ACCESSIBILITY IN NOTION
Create a Tips for Accessibility in Notion page that outlines several great accessibility features that Notion offers, but are not well known to many users.
03 PROPOSING DESIGN CHANGES TO IMPROVE ACCESSIBILITY
Propose implementable design solutions to solve identified accessibility issues
And here they are... our final recommendations! 📣
Meet the accessible Notion – your beloved productivity tool for creating highly customizable workspaces 🖋️
01: Adjust text color to meet accessible contrast ratios outlined by WCAG
Notion's native color options in dark mode present an accessibility issue. 9/10 of the colors fail the AAA (Enhanced) guidelines, and the purple fails to meet the AA (Minimum) guideline.
By adjusting the brightness of the hex code levels for text input allows all of Notion’s color options to pass both AA and AAA WCAG guidelines for text contrast
02: Adapt the multi-column layout to a single column when resizing pages to avoid loss of content and function
While content on pages with multiple columns resized up to 125% zoom is clear and function, anything above that results in a lack of content and functionality in the Notion interface. It is required by WCAG standards that interfaces can be zoomed up to 200% without loss of content or functionality.
It is our recommendation that Notion implements a feature where multiple columns collapse into a single, accessible column when content is resized above 125%. This will avoid loss of content and functionality of the page, and increase its accessibility.
03: Increase minimum target sizes for increased accessibility
Small target sizes can make interaction difficult, especially for users with limited dexterity or when using touchscreens, leading to errors and frustration. This issue can also affect individuals using assistive technologies, such as styluses or screen readers, further reducing accessibility and usability.
Designing controls to be intuitive and user-friendly simplifies interactions, since precision can be a challenge. Ensuring the minimum target size as 44 by 44 CSS pixels so that users can operate features effortlessly, reducing friction and improving accessibility for individuals of all skill levels and abilities.
04: Adding contextual labels to increase user control
WCAG guidelines state that any interface that contains moving, blinking or scrolling information offers a mechanism to pause, stop, or hide it. Notion's AI automatically updates with an answer when asked a question, but while it has a mechanism to pause this, it is not accessible.
Adding descriptive labels improves usability by clarifying the purpose of buttons, links, and inputs, ensuring that users can easily understand and operate the interface without confusion.
Placing responses directly below the initial text entry minimizes sudden screen movement, ensuring a stable and predictable user experience. Reduces distractions and helps users maintain focus, especially for those who rely on assistive technologies or have difficulty tracking dynamic content.
Next steps
What we would like to see changed in Notion’s approach to accessibility?
Here are the key changes we believe Notion should prioritize to improve accessibility and create a more inclusive experience:
01 ENSURE NOTION MEETS MINIMUM WCAG STANDARDS
As designers and researchers, we strongly advocate for Notion to develop a more inclusive and accessible interface. Through WCAG design evaluation and cognitive walkthrough, we have highlighted a few immediate modifications, spanning both design and code
02 CREATE TRANSPARENCY IN ACCESSIBLITY EFFORTS
Notion must formulate a comprehensive strategy for becoming an accessible platform. It will help establish user trust if they set clear milestones for their accessibility efforts and communicate transparently.
03 ENCOURAGE NOTION USERS TO DESIGN ACCESSIBLY
Provide resources to educate users on how to create accessible public/collaborative Notion pages and encourage accessible design.
We envision Notion evolving its functionality, enhancing accessibility, and improving usability—empowering diverse users while ensuring everyone can stay organized comfortably and maximize productivity.
Presentation and reception
Our efforts impressed and were applauded by our mentor, our peers, and even Notion! 🥳
Our mentor for this project, Professor Nick Dease (Librarian @ University of Richmond, UX Accessibility Expert) was very impressed by our extended efforts throughout this project. He mentioned that identifying these forms of "nested accessibility" and addressing them upfront can create a ripple of accessibility education, and is very important for the future of digital user experiences.
We also shared our comprehensive project files with Notion, and while they were unable to do a detailed review, they recognized our efforts, and commended us on our goals for the project. My team and I sincerely hope that our work can be helpful to them as they continue to design with accessibility in mind.
Reflecting on what I learned
Accessibility has a domino effect, and addressing it from the very beginning can make a huge difference 🁽
Accessibility is a continuous process that requires both time and practice. It's not just a one-time consideration but an ongoing effort that a design team must embed into every aspect of their work. The more I focus on it, the more I realize how essential it is to approach it thoughtfully from the start. Over time, this practice leads to better designs that serve all users.
WCAG standards are not the end all be all of accessibility! 🫵🏽
Meeting WCAG standards is important, but it doesn’t guarantee that an interface is truly accessible or user-friendly for all users. While WCAG provides a solid framework for inclusivity, real-world usability requires considering the diverse needs of users, including, and especially those with disabilities, and understanding how they interact with digital platforms in practical scenarios.
Small changes can have huge impacts 💥
Small design changes can have a big impact on accessibility. In our case, simple adjustments like adding alt text and tweaking hex codes to improve contrast significantly enhances the user experience for disabled users. It’s a reminder that accessibility often comes down to the small details, which are crucial for creating more inclusive, user-friendly experiences.
Appendix
WCAG Evaluation
View our detailed WCAG Evaluation of Notion's interface.
Cognitive Walkthrough
View our cognitive walkthrough of Notion's onboarding and getting started tasks from the perspective of Lea.
Accessibility Tips Page
Want to learn how to make your Notion pages more accessible? See tips that would help!
Blog Post
Want to read our blog post that talks about Notion x A11Y?
Presentation
We presented our findings at the end of the project! View our presentation below.
Figma Workspace
We detailed our process and findings in a Figma Workspace — check it out to learn more!