Basic accessibility checks
WCAG covers a lot of criteria and a lot of scenarios. Because it is a full standard, it has to cover every eventuality. To be able to say your service is fully compliant, you will need to check everything. There is no getting around it.
However, when testing we find most WCAG failures fall under the same 15 to 20 criteria. So, we’ve made a checklist of our top 10 things to test. We think this should cover a lot of the serious accessibility barriers people face and should tell you quite quickly how accessible your website or digital service is.
To make this checklist, we combined the common failures found by 8 different accessibility auditors along with the findings from the Accessibility monitoring of public sector websites and mobile apps 2020-2021 corporate report.
We grouped the tests into a logical order based on how easy the tests are to execute, and how much effort they will take to fix.
Version 2.0.0 of the basic accessibility checklist is now available to download.
Download the basic accessibility checklist as an Excel Document (.xlsx)
Download the basic accessibility checklist as an Open Document Spreadsheet (.ods)
1. Automated tools
- WCAG criteria:
Various others
- Checklist:
HTML is valid
ARC Toolkit used
Axe Devtools used
Wave used
2. Responsive design
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
All information available in portrait and landscape
Font size scales without breaking the layout when zooming
No horizontal scrolling on banned elements at 320px
Font size will scale up to “very large” and still be clear
3. Keyboard accessibility
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
All interactions work using a keyboard
Focus is never trapped
Page has is a working skip link
Focus order is logical
Focus is always visible
Focus is contained within modals and pop-ups
Focus does not submit forms or activate links
4. Headings and labels
- Checklist:
No heading levels have been skipped
Tables are captioned, headed and marked up correctly
Page has a H1, but not more than one
Headings and labels are clear and descriptive
All form fields have a label
5. Page title
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
Page title describes the current page
Page title describes the current website or service
6. Links and buttons
- Checklist:
The purpose of each link and button is clear
No broken or internal-only links
Navigation menus on more than one page are in the same order
Buttons on more than one page are labelled consistently
Button icons have a text alternative
Buttons and links use the correct tags or roles
7. Colour contrast
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
Colour alone is not used to convey information
Text larger than 18pt (24px) has a ratio of 3:1 or more
Text larger than 14pt (19px) and bold has a ratio of 3:1 or more
Text smaller than 18pt (24px) and not bold has a ratio of 4.5:1
Non-text elements have a contrast ratio of 3:1
Focus styles have a contrast ratio of 3:1
8. Images
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
Alt text for important images is clear and accurate
Decorative images are hidden from screen readers
No images of text are being used
9. Announcements and alerts
- Checklist:
Any field which causes a validation error is easy to identify
Validation errors are explained so its easy to understand how to fix it
Validation errors are announced to screen readers
Expanded or collapsed sections are announced to screen readers
Notification messages are announced to screen readers
Pop-ups are announced to screen readers
10. Session timeouts
- WCAG criteria:
- Checklist:
There is a way to extend session timeouts without losing data