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Accessible Web Design and Development

The most common mistake in web development is treating accessibility as a final polish or a checkbox for the Quality Assurance (QA) team at the end of a project. When accessibility is an afterthought, it inevitably results in patchwork code that is brittle, expensive to maintain, and often fails to provide a truly equitable experience.

Regardless of the development methodology - whether it is a fast-paced Agile cycle or a traditional Waterfall framework - accessibility must be intentionally considered throughout every single phase of the development process.

Accessibility in the Design Phase

While accessibility should be incorporated throughout the lifecycle of a project, addressing it during the Design phase is when it is most effective. 

  • The Reality: Approximately two-thirds of accessibility issues are directly introduced in the Design phase.
  • The Cost Benefit: Fixing an accessibility barrier during the Design phase is up to 30 times cheaper than fixing it after the code has been launched.
  • Cognitive Inclusion: The Design phase is the best opportunity to address accessibility for cognitive disabilities by establishing clear, predictable, and legible interfaces from the start.

Design Phase Best Practices

  • Annotate design documents: Designers should annotate mockups to map out a logical focus order and document explicit alternative text for complex imagery. 
  • Verify color contrast early: Confirm that all text-to-background color combinations meet the minimum contrast ratio requirement before passing files to developers. 
  • Design for cognitive clarity: Considerations for Cognitive Disabilities: Proactively reduce cognitive friction by implementing highly clear and consistent layouts, utilizing simplified language, choosing legible fonts and text spacing, ensuring predictable user interactions, and organizing information into structured content. 
  • Utilize reusable pattern Libraries: Build your applications using a foundation of pre-vetted, accessible user interface components. Ensuring that each individual component in your pattern library is fully accessible drastically reduces the manual QA effort needed once pages are built.

Accessibility during Development and QA

Once a design leaves the wireframe stage, the development and QA teams are responsible for turning those accessible blueprints into semantic, highly functional code. Use these core practices to ensure your code holds up to technical standards: 

Development and QA Best Practices

  • Prioritize semantic HTML: Always use native HTML elements for their intended purposes. Semantic markup gives assistive technologies built-in keyboard accessibility and structural context automatically.
  • Apply ARIA with restraint: Follow the golden rule of ARIA - if you can use a native HTML element instead of a custom-coded ARIA attribute, do it. Only use ARIA when creating advanced, custom interactive components that HTML cannot support on its own.
  • Build responsive reflow: Ensure your layouts stay perfectly fluid and readable when zoomed up to 400%. Content must reflow vertically so low-vision users do not have to scroll horizontally to read a line of text.
  • Establish a "Definition of Done": Never mark a user story, feature, or page as "complete" until it has passed baseline accessibility screening.
  • Perform Manual Testing: Manual testing (or human evaluation) goes beyond automated checkers and catches the remaining accessibility issues. By performing keyboard-only interactions, testing zoom, and content tests, you can verify that a website is functionally accessible to real people. The resources below can help guide you.

Resources

California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office Home Page

Inquiries about the CCC Accessibility Center may be directed to: accessibility@ccctechcenter.org

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