A few years ago I sat through a design review where someone spent ten minutes debating a shadow’s blur radius. Ten minutes. Accessibility got one line at the end: “oh, and make sure it’s accessible.”
A lot of teams treat accessibility like this, almost like it’s a spell check. Something you run at the very end, after the real decisions are already locked in.
So I changed how I run reviews. Here’s how.
I ask about focus order before I ask about visual hierarchy. If we’re reviewing a form or a flow, the first question is what happens when someone tabs through it with a keyboard. Not last, first. If the answer is “we haven’t thought about that yet,” the design isn’t done, no matter how polished it looks.
I bring specific scenarios instead of general concerns. Instead of asking “is this accessible,” I’ll ask something like: if someone using a screen reader lands on this card, what do they hear first? Or what happens to this layout at 200% zoom? Specific questions get specific answers. Vague questions just get vague reassurance back.
I treat color contrast like a typo, not a debate. There’s no version of “it’s close enough” that I’d accept for a contrast ratio any more than I’d accept it for a misspelled headline.
I ask who tested it and how. Automated tools catch a fraction of accessibility issues, somewhere around 30% by most estimates. If the answer is “the linter passed,” that’s a start. It’s not an answer.
This may slow a review down slightly. But from a holistic standpoint, it speeds things up, because you catch structural problems early instead of relitigating them after engineering has already built the thing.
The teams that do this well don’t have one accessibility expert sitting in every single review. They just have reviewers who ask these questions early and consistently, without treating access as a separate checklist bolted onto the “real” design work.
That’s what I look for when I’m deciding whether someone’s ready to run reviews on their own. Do they ask about access as naturally as they ask about layout? Or does it only come up once someone else brings it up first?