Accessibility checklist
General Techniques
Judicious use of colors, fonts, and graphics.
Restraint is the key word. A web page can, in many ways, be likened to a page in a book. As a general rule:
1. Avoid the use of more than two or three colors (plus white) and three font sizes.
2. Use bold and italic sparingly (for titles and occasional emphasis), and avoid underlining plain text (people often mistake underlined plain text as a link).
3. As far as colors go, keep in mind that 8-12% of the population is color blind.
4. The most common form of color blindness is Red-Green, where the colors red and green can appear as a shade of brown. Placing red text on green, or vice versa, may yield an unreadable web page for roughly 10% of your visitors.
5. Similar problems may occur when using red, green, and brown in graphics (pie charts, graphs, maps, etc). Instead, consider using textures and fill patterns. Otherwise, use colors with a good measure of contrast (light tones vs. dark tones).
6. Try to minimize your use of textured backgrounds. If you must use them, make sure they are very low contrast. Be especially careful when choosing font and link colors on a colored background.
7. Also, avoid animated gifs (or have them loop only once or twice). They are distracting when trying to read text on a page, and for some people with certain learning disabilities animated gifs may be very difficult to ignore.
Consistent layout.
1. Determine a common layout for your all of your web pages, and stick to it. This greatly assists visitors in navigating your web pages, and for some may determine their ability to understand the organization of your pages.
2. Placement of the title, logo, navigation and content should be consistent from page to page.
3. Navigational links should be placed within the first "screen" the viewer encounters on any given page (they shouldn't have to scroll to find the links).