28-Feb-20 | News

Things that indicate designers have no clue about accessibility

  • Poor colour contrast
People with different disabilities looking at a webpage

Red on Green? Red/Green on a dark background? White on pale blue? Gray below 40 % saturation? None of these will pass the 3.0:1 minimum contrast ratio requirement in WCAG for textkeyboard focus indicators, or activatable icons.

An experienced accessibility tester can tell with one glance whether or not colours on a page satisfy these requirements. Everyone else should probably check using a colour contrast analyser. 

  • Inaccessible tech stack

It is not possible to make flash accessible (thank goodness it is just about dead). I have yet to find someone who has made D3 charting completely accessible. CAPTCHAs are problematic — honey pots are a much better solution for preventing DOS attacks. v3 of the Google “I am not a robot” is the only CAPTCHA you should be using, and then only if it is absolutely necessary.

  • No (or only automated) close captioning

Automatic captions are getting better but still NOT an equivalent experience, especially if your speakers are non-native English speakers or you use a lot of technical/medical terms that don’t show up in common dictionaries. You need at least 92 % accuracy for people who rely on the captions to be able to fill in the blank for the rest. Some autocaptioning hovers around 60–70 % accuracy that just isn’t good enough. 

  • No accessibility statement

Accessibility statements are not a guarantee of accessibility. They are more like a statement of intent. They indicate the company at least knows about accessibility, and if you call them out on something that is inaccessible, they may try to fix it. They may provide you information on the best environment to try things out on. Most importantly, they may give you contact info for people who are responsible for accessibility within the organisation.

  • You hit tab button and a skip to content link doesn’t come up

I am a keyboard only user, but even if I wasn’t, the first thing I do when I go to a site I haven’t visited before is hit the tab button. What *should* happen is a “skip to content” link should come up. If it doesn’t, chances of keyboard testing having been exhaustively conducted and bugs resolved is vanishingly close to zero.

Original source of the article