10 things that indicate designers have no clue about accessibility

Once you see more than one of the items below, you can be fairly sure that accessibility was not considered in design and development

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People frequently reach out to me* asking if a particular site is accessible. This happened last night, and I only had 15 minutes to spend on checking it. I started with a mental checklist of “does the person who created this site care about accessibility?” I realized then that others might benefit from that list, so here it is — signs that I feel are indicative that people didn’t know or didn’t care about accessibility when building their website/apps.

#1 Poor color contrast

Red on Green? Red/Green on a dark background? White on pale blue? Gray below 40 % saturation? None of these will pass the 3.0:1 minimum contrast ratio requirement in WCAG for text, keyboard focus indicators, or activatable icons.

An experienced accessibility tester can tell with one glance whether or not colors on a page satisfy these requirements. Everyone else should probably check using a color contrast analyzer. My personal favorite is the one from The Paciello Group.

Poor color contrast is #1 on my “signs of not caring about accessibility” list because fixing colors requires changing a couple of characters in the code. Sometimes it can be fixed through a content manager, you don’t even have to know how to code. That’s it. If the site/app owners didn’t care enough to do that, it is all but guaranteed that they didn’t follow any of the other 49 WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines either.

#2 Inaccessible tech stack

It is not possible to make flash accessible (thank goodness it is just about dead). I have yet to find someone who has made D3 charting…