accessibility-audit

name	Accessibility Audit
description	Check a design against the requirements that are cheaper to meet than to retrofit.
category	Design

Accessibility Audit

Not a final polish pass. Nearly everything here is a constraint on decisions already made — colour, type scale, target size, motion — which is why it is cheap now and expensive later.

When to use

• Any design that ships to people. That is all of them.
• Before a design system is handed over, since it will replicate whatever it encodes.

Steps

1. Contrast first. Text against its background, at its actual weight and size, including states — disabled, placeholder, and text over images.
2. Check it without colour. Anything that only colour distinguishes fails for a substantial number of people and is usually trivial to fix at this stage.
3. Target size and spacing. Anything interactive, on the smallest supported device, hit by a thumb rather than a cursor.
4. Walk it by keyboard. Order, focus visibility, and whether anything traps focus. If you cannot complete the task, neither can a screen-reader user.
5. Check motion. Anything that moves needs a reduced-motion answer, and parallax and autoplay are the two that reliably harm people.
6. Record the constraints as design-decisions, so the next revision does not undo them as arbitrary.

Output

A list of failures with the specific requirement each one misses, and design-decisions rows for the constraints that must survive the next revision. Anything that cannot be met is a risks row, not a silent omission.