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
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…