Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria
Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria
Posted by:
Paul Hayes, Posted on: 24 January 2018
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Categories:
Best practice
At Government Digital Service, everything we build must be accessible. It’s one of our design principles, ‘This is for everyone’:
Accessible design is good design. Everything we build should be as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. […] The people who most need our services are often the people who find them hardest to use. Let’s think about those people from the start.
Accessibility acceptance criteria are one of the tools we use to make sure our user interfaces are accessible.
What are accessibility acceptance criteria?
They are a list of conditions that a user interface must meet to be considered accessible. They help us raise awareness of access needs and maintain accessibility as we iterate.
GDS has used acceptance criteria for years (for example, this 2015 Verify blogpost about acceptance criteria and in the 2014 GOV.UK style guidance), so formalising and expanding the accessibility-related acceptance criteria seemed logical.
Be aware that accessibility acceptance criteria alone won’t make your service accessible – read more guidance on building [...]