Design
Accessibility Evaluation Protocol
Audit accessibility early to avoid costly fixes later. Evaluate against WCAG, user needs, and assistive tech. Finding problems in design is cheaper than fixing them in production.
Duration
2 hours
Group Size
2-4
Category
Design
Difficulty
Easy
Participants will:
- Find accessibility barriers in an interface.
- Test with assistive technology and users.
- Prioritize issues by severity.
- Create a remediation plan.
Participants will produce:
- A list of accessibility barriers with severity ratings.
- Test results from assistive technologies.
- A prioritized remediation plan.
Automated tools are a starting point. They miss confusing interactions, illogical flow, missing context, and poor labeling. Manual and user testing are essential. If you haven't used a screen reader, prepare to be surprised. What's obvious to sighted users can be opaque to screen reader users. Test early, test often, and test with real users. Keyboard-only navigation exposes poor information architecture and unclear focus states. A bad keyboard experience means a worse screen reader experience. Accessibility issues found during design cost hours to fix. Issues found in production cost days. Issues found after a lawsuit cost millions. Evaluate early and continuously.
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