1.3.3 Sensory Characteristics

WCAG 2.2 · 1.3.3 A Perceivable

What it requires

Instructions for understanding and operating content must not depend solely on a single sensory characteristic of a component — its shape, size, visual location, orientation, or sound. Wherever you point users to something by how it looks or sounds, add another cue they can perceive: the component’s visible text label, its accessible name, or a clear textual description.

The classic failure is phrasing like “Click the round button on the right” or “Use the green box below” — sense-only references that a blind, low-vision, or colour-blind user cannot resolve. Saying “Select Submit” works for everyone because the label is the cue.

  • Blind and screen-reader users — cannot perceive shape, size, colour, or on-screen position, so “the button on the right” is meaningless.
  • Low-vision and colour-blind users — may not distinguish a “green” control or perceive its relative size or location.
  • Deaf and hard-of-hearing users — miss instructions that rely only on a sound (“when you hear a beep, continue”).
  • Users whose layout reflows — at high zoom or on mobile the “left/right/below” spatial reference no longer matches what they see.

How to detect it

Manual and tool checks
Check What to look for
Read the prose Scan instructions, help text, and tooltips for words like round, square, big, above, below, left, right, here, the green one used as the only way to identify a control.
Screen reader Confirm any referenced control is identifiable by its name/label alone, without seeing its shape or position.
Zoom & reflow At 200%+ or narrow viewports, verify spatial references (“the panel on the right”) still make sense after layout changes.
Audio cues Any sound-only instruction must have an equivalent visible cue.
Automated tools Cannot reliably detect this — it is semantic. axe, WAVE, and Lighthouse will not flag it; manual review is required.

How to fix it

  1. Find every instruction that points to a control by shape, size, colour, position, orientation, or sound.
  2. Add the control’s visible text label or accessible name to the reference, so it is identifiable without the sensory cue.
  3. You may keep the sensory cue as a supplement — just never let it stand alone. “Select the round Submit button” is fine.
  4. Replace spatial words with relationships that survive reflow (“in the Billing section”) instead of “on the right”.

Pair the sensory hint with the label so the text alone identifies the target:

<!-- Avoid: sense-only -->
<p>Press the green button on the right to continue.</p>

<!-- Better: label is the cue -->
<p>Press the green <strong>Continue</strong> button to proceed.</p>
<button type="submit">Continue</button>

Copy-paste tests

Automated coverage

There is no fully automated axe-core rule for 1.3.3. Instructions that rely on shape, size, position, or colour can only be caught by manual review, using the console check and steps below.

Run this in the browser console

1-3-3-sensory.js 
// Read-only: surfaces text with sense-only instructions for human review.
const cues = /\b(left|right|above|below|top|bottom|round|square|green|red|blue|to the (left|right))\b/i;
const hits = [...document.querySelectorAll('p,li,span,label,button,a')]
  .filter(el => cues.test(el.textContent) && el.textContent.trim().length < 200);
console.table(hits.map(el => ({ tag: el.tagName, text: el.textContent.trim().slice(0, 80) })));
hits.forEach(el => el.style.outline = '2px solid magenta'); // visual only, not saved

What to check manually: for each flagged element, confirm the instruction still makes sense without sight of the page — e.g. a "green Submit button" is also named so it works in greyscale, and "the menu on the right" also has a usable label or heading a screen-reader user can locate.