A practical checklist for accessibility testing

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time accessibility testing comes up.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The checklist

• Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues
• Keyboard-only testing finds problems in minutes
• Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about accessibility testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.