Website Accessibility Checklist

One of the most overlooked aspects of web development has long been accessibility. More often then not the mentality has been "blind people don't come to my site so who cares?" To that end let me dispense with a common myth...

Accessibility is not about building sites for blind people. Accessibility is about making your site available to the largest possible audience. That does include blind people but also the hearing-impaired, those with motor-skills impairments that can't use a mouse, and those with only slight vision-impairments. Personally I happen to have pretty good vision, but if it's 7AM and I don't have my contacts in, I may want to resize the 9px font you used for the copy on your site. Building accessible sites means making the site available to everyone.

If you've done any work on government sites you've probably heard about Section 508. It's basically a law that requires any government site to be compliant with some basic accessibility guidelines. It's not yet a law for non-government sites but it may be one day. Overall accessibility is a good habit to get into.

Most web developers I know think one of two things:

Making a site accessible takes a lot of extra time, effort, and/or money
Adding ALT tags to site images will make the site compliant.

Both of these assessments are positively false. There's much more to making a site accessible than simply adding image ALT tags but neither is it expensive or time consuming. To help, I've put together a handy checklist of some of the things to keep in mind when building a new site. This isn't meant to be a definitive list, just some quick reference material on the basics.

Website Accessibility Checklist – - 24 KB
Website Accessibility Checklist – - 65 KB