ARIA labels for small teams

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Most advice about ARIA labels assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to keep

No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

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

Labels must match what the control actually does. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about ARIA labels before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Labels must match what the control actually does — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.