What to ask your agency about accessibility testing

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on accessibility testing, these questions are worth asking early.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about accessibility testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.