WCAG compliance: what to get right first

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you only fix one thing about WCAG compliance this quarter, make it the first item below.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

AA is the level most organisations are held to. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Then this

Compliance is a floor, not a finish line. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Eventually

Some sectors have a legal obligation, not a preference. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

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 WCAG compliance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Compliance is a floor, not a finish line — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.