Five mistakes teams make with WCAG compliance

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit WCAG compliance.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• AA is the level most organisations are held to
• Compliance is a floor, not a finish line
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Some sectors have a legal obligation, not a preference. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Turning this into a decision

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
• AA is the level most organisations are held to — 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.