Checklist

We've covered a bunch of ground related to improving the accessibility of visual designs. One of the most important steps you can take to ensuring you create accessible experiences is accounting for accessibility at the start and throughout the design process. To that end, use the following checklist when you begin to formalize your visual designs for a website or application:

• Do I have sufficient contrast between text and my background?

• Do I have sufficient contrast between UI elements and my background?

• Are there any places where I'm color or other visual means alone to indicate something (ie, no text equivalent)?

• Is my written content simple and easy to understand?

• Are there any cases where the screen is flashing or flickering?

• Does every mouse interaction have a keyboard-only equivalent interaction?

• Have captions been included with any audio or audio/visual presentation?

• If any interaction involves a timed response or session timeout, is this communicated well?

There are also a number of free tools available for assessing the accessibility:

• WAVE by WebAIM for general website accessibility
• Juicy Studio's Readability Test
• Vischeck's Color Blindness Checker
• Functional Accessibility Evaluator 2.2
• AInspector Sidebar for Firefox
• Pa11y
• Koa11y