Accessibility testing for small teams

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Most advice about accessibility testing assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to keep

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

What good looks like

Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The short version

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
• Keyboard-only testing finds problems in minutes — 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.