A quick Web Accessibility Checklist

Often we hear people asking how can they check for a website for accessibility and what needs to be checked. Here is a quick checklist and hope this would be handy to someone!

• Is the link “Skip to main content” exist? Although, there are several other ways to achieve quick navigation by providing heading mark-up, aria land marks, it’s still easier to hit on one link to reach the main content.
• Does the website provides any accessibility options, such as “Color options” “Font re-size option” etc? This would be good, if your target audience have learning difficulties or new to internet users, else, a help page with an article how one could use the existing accessibility options within the browsers would be helpful.
• Does all the informative images have appropriate alternate text?
• Does decorative images has given empty alt text i.e. alt=””?
• Does the web page has appropriate heading structure?
• Does the website has a site map?
• Is acronyms provided with appropriate information?
• Does all the form fields have associated labels?
• Does the website uses Frames, if so, appropriate titles provided to frames?
• Is all the functionality of the web page available via keyboard?
• Does all the links have descriptive screen text?
• If an audio content is present, is there a synchronized captions or a text transcript available?
• If CAPTCHA is present, is it accessible to screen reader users and to Braille Display users? if not, is there an alternative method provided such as Audio CAPTCHA or logical questions based captcha
• Is semantic mark-up is used to designate headings and lists
• Are Table columns and rows have associated headers using “th” tags?
• Does tables have descriptive table summary and caption?
• Is structure of the web page is logical and meaningful?
• Color alone is not used to convey the information
• Is foreground and background color has enough contrast?
• Is there a pause / stop functionality for moving, blinking or scrolling content?
• The content and functionality should not have time limits, if necessary, user should be allowed to extend the time as per their choice. If the authentication expires, user should be able to re-authenticate and continue the activity without losing any data
• Page has appropriate and descriptive page title
• The language of the web page is identified using the HTML tag “lang” attribute