Five accessibility checks you can do in ten minutes

Accessibility can feel like a specialist subject, full of guidelines and acronyms. A proper audit does need expertise. But many of the most common problems can be found by anyone on a product team, in about ten minutes, with nothing more than a laptop.

I treat WCAG 2.2 AA (the widely used standard for accessible websites) as a baseline, not a stretch goal, and I test my own work with a keyboard and a screen reader. These five checks are the ones I’d teach anyone who wants to start.

1. Put the mouse away and use the keyboard

Click into the address bar, then press Tab to move through the page. Shift+Tab goes back, Enter follows links and presses buttons, and Space ticks boxes. Try to complete one real task, like signing up or adding something to your basket.

What good looks like: you can always see where you are, because the focused item has a clear outline. The order makes sense, moving top to bottom and left to right. Nothing traps you, and menus, pop-ups and date pickers all work without a mouse.

2. Zoom to 200%

Press Ctrl and + (or Cmd and + on a Mac) until your browser shows 200%. Lots of people with low vision browse like this every day.

What good looks like: text gets bigger and the layout rearranges itself to fit. Nothing overlaps, nothing gets cut off, and you don’t have to scroll sideways to read a sentence. Buttons and menus are still there and still usable.

3. Check the colour contrast

Light grey text on a white background looks elegant in a mock-up and is hard to read for many people, especially on a phone in sunlight. Use a free contrast checker (WebAIM has a good one, and most design tools have plugins) to test your text colour against its background.

What good looks like: normal text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, which is the WCAG AA level. Large text and icons that carry meaning need at least 3:1. And colour is never the only signal: an error should have a message or icon too, not just a red border.

4. Look at the images

Ask: if this image didn’t load, what would someone miss? Alt text is the short description a screen reader reads out instead. You can check it with a browser extension, or by right-clicking an image and choosing Inspect.

What good looks like: images that carry information describe that information. Decorative images are marked as decorative so screen readers skip them. File names like “IMG_2041.jpg” and phrases like “image of” are signs that nobody thought about it.

5. Listen with a screen reader for two minutes

Screen readers read the page aloud for people who can’t see it. Every Mac and iPhone has VoiceOver built in (Cmd+F5 on a Mac turns it on and off), and NVDA is free for Windows. You won’t be fluent in two minutes, and that’s fine. You’re listening for things that sound wrong.

What good looks like: headings are announced as headings, so the page has a clear outline. Buttons and links say what they do (“Add to basket”, not “Click here”). Form fields read out their labels, and error messages are read out when they appear.

1. 1 Turn it on VoiceOver on Mac (Cmd+F5) or NVDA on Windows.
2. 2 Move through Use Tab, or the screen reader's own keys, to go item by item.
3. 3 Fill a form Check every field announces its label and any errors.
4. 4 Turn it off Note anything that sounded confusing or missing.

A bonus check: forms

Forms are where a lot of these problems meet. Every field should have a visible label that stays put, not placeholder text that vanishes when you start typing. Errors should appear next to the field, explain how to fix it, and not rely on colour alone.

What these checks won’t do

Ten minutes won’t replace a full audit or testing with disabled people. Automated tools and quick checks catch a lot, but not everything. What they do is catch the obvious problems early, while they’re cheap to fix, and they build a habit across the team.

I’d suggest picking one check and running it on your own product this week. If it surfaces something, you’ve already made the product better for someone.