Checklists are an invaluable part of the planning testing and evaluation process. As decisions are made regarding levels of compliance a site will reach, what functionality it will include, time scales and budgets, you will be able to start building your website accessibility checklist. The objectives of a checklist are to:
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Assign roles: issues identified can be assigned to key site stakeholders such as the developers, designers, content producers, third party content producers and so on.
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Track progress: checklists can be developed throughout the planning and building process to form a testing document used at launch and as a maintenance document post launch.
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Prioritise work: outlining issues in accordance to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) priority levels A, AA or AAA helps prioritise work
RNIB See it Right checklist
The example checklist is of the See it Right checkpoints and issues relating to each checkpoint. The checklist is intended as a starting point for your own use. You can use this as a basis to produce your own checklist customised according to your project. For example, if your site does not use images maps then the section on image maps can be removed. Use the "See it Right checkpoints explained documents" as background for each checkpoint.
The top row in the website accessibility checklist includes fields that can be adjusted to suit your particular design and build needs. Further suggestions of columns that you may want to use are as follows:
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See it Right standard (Word, 294KB) - This document gives explanation on the 28 checkpoints of the See it Right standard.
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See it Right checklist (Excel, 33KB) - This spreadsheet lists all 28 checkpoints in See it Right as well as each issue under each checkpoint. This is a handy list that can be used during your planning, designing, building and testing stages of making your site accessible.
Other checklists
Additional checklists can be downloaded from the Web Accessibility Initiative, Section 508 and the IBM Accessibility centre: