WCAG compliance for small teams

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

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

AA is the level most organisations are held to. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to approach it

Some sectors have a legal obligation, not a preference. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. 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

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