Accessibility Checklists — Just say No
I am a Accessibility Manager with 15 years of experience. No more general A11Y Checklists, PLEASE !!!
There are so many articles touting themselves as general “accessibility checklists” that I’ve literally lost track. Even respected organizations like W3C and WebAIM have published them. WCAG 2.1 triggered the authoring of a slew of new checklists. Consultancies post checklists partially to try and prove that they are subject matter experts, and partially to scare companies into thinking “wow, this is complicated, I need to hire a consultant.” There is one author who appears to be in the process of posting a general accessibility checklist for every…single … US state.
There has been an entire book written on checklist use by Atul Gawande, Rhodes Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, Harvard educated surgeon who is now the head of the new Amazon / Berkshire / Chase health partnership. His opinion — Checklists might be thought of as handy, but are abused and frequently used inappropriately. If you don’t believe me, believe him :-)
In general, I strongly believe that general checklists are the lazy/ignorant person’s approach to accessibility, and they should be avoided unless there are NO other alternatives. They are probably better than providing no instructions at all, but…
