Accessible digital services: a delivery checklist

Accessibility gets discovered too late when it's treated as a review step instead of a delivery practice — surfacing during a procurement review or a pre-launch audit, once the interface is expensive to change. The checklist below is what to test at each stage instead, so findings show up as ordinary defects during the build, not as a blocking finding at the end.

At design

• Keyboard-only task flows sketched before visual design is finalized — if a flow only works with a mouse, that has to be caught here.
• Visible focus states planned as part of the interaction design, not left to the browser default.
• Content structured semantically (headings, landmarks, form labels) before visual styling is applied on top of it.

At build

• Semantic markup implemented as written, not approximated with generic elements styled to look right.
• Full keyboard operability across every interactive element, including custom components.
• WCAG 2.2 AA (Section 508 alongside it for federal and many state government contexts) as the working target for every screen, applications and administrative interfaces included.

At release

• Assistive-technology testing (keyboard and screen reader) as a required check, not a substitute-by-automated-scanner shortcut — automated tools catch a subset of issues, not all of them.
• Findings tracked in the same defect-tracking process as functional bugs, not a separate audit that runs once and is then forgotten.
• A retest of any flow that changes after the first accessibility pass — accessibility regresses like any other quality attribute if it isn't retested.

What this checklist doesn't claim

WCAG 2.2 AA is stated here as a working delivery target, verified by keyboard and screen-reader testing — not a claimed certification. No specific compliance certification is asserted anywhere on this basis alone.

Next step

Tell us which stage your current build is at and we'll help you work through the relevant part of this checklist rather than starting an audit from zero.