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

Sheri Byrne-Haber, CPACC
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readFeb 5, 2020

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

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

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Sheri Byrne-Haber, CPACC

LinkedIn Top Voice for Social Impact 2022. UX Collective Author of the Year 2020. Disability Inclusion SME. Sr Staff Accessibility Architect @ VMware.

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Agreed, thanks for this list! A big one I see is lot is non-descriptive, repetitive links with no aria text, e.g. "read more" "read more" "read more" "read more"

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