7 things that turn good accessibility into great accessibility

“It’s easy to pick on people who do a crappy job at accessibility. Why don’t you write an article on how to get people good at accessibility to up their game?” I was asked in one PM. Challenge accepted.

Photo by Jad Limcaco on Unsplash

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.

The difference between good and great is a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon

— Rob Light, Creative Artists Agency (speaking about Dua Lipa)

This article is the other end of the spectrum from the article I wrote last week entitled “10 things that indicate designers have no clue about accessibility”

Almost 98 % of the top million web pages are completely inaccessible, with almost 60 accessibility violations per page on average. So it is easy to find crappy pages to dump on, because only 2 % of web pages on the internet are doing either a good job or a great job. Here are the elements that differentiate the good pages from the great pages.

Good accessibility is about compliance, GREAT accessibility is about empathy

People running great accessibility programs don’t stop when the desired WCAG standard is reached. Here are a few examples:

• Does the product stop accessibility improvements when AA is met, or follow AAA guidelines that really should have been AA guidelines, such as touch target size?
• Has color contrast been evaluated exactly as required in WCAG 1.4.3? Or was color contrast made accessible for everyone, and in objects beyond just text. Great accessibility checks color contrast in unimpaired vision and color blindness modes, as well as checking the contrast of keyboard…