Webpage Accessibility Checklist
Using this list should result in highly accessible (though not necessarily perfect) site. If you are unsure of what a heading is referring to, please refer to the associated links for more information.
Theme Selection
Using an “accessibility ready” theme is solid foundation for a more accessible site. Themes with this label have gone through extra steps to validate their accessibility.
Header Usage
Think about headers (h1, h2, h3, etc) like an outline for a paper, rather than a way to achieve decorative effects. Headers should go in order and can have other content like paragraphs or images in the order.
Patterns like H1, H2, H2, H3, H2 are fine in the same way that outlines have different levels of topics but patterns like H1, H3, H4 would not be valid because the H2 level is skipped.
In the case of this document, the ‘Webpage Accessibility Checklist’ text above is set to be an H2 element. The elements below (‘Color and Contrast’ etc.) are set as h3 elements. You can get a much deeper explanation of headings and accessibility here.
Color and Contrast
It’s important to have strong contrast between text and its background.
Color should not used as only indicator of meaning.
Text
Make sure the font is easy to read. Readability for fonts is based on a combination of the font color vs the background color and the size of the font.
Sites that use small text should have the option to enlarge it.
Links
Descriptive links should explain in words what you’re linking to.
Links should have other indicators beyond color to indicate the text is a link.
The same words for a link should only be used once per page (unless linking to the same thing).
Images and Video
All informational images should have (appropriate) alt text.
All videos should be captioned.
Featured photo by Launchpresso on Unsplash