Accessibility (WCAG 2.2) Checklist for Launch
A practical pre-launch accessibility pass: Lighthouse a11y score, image alt text, form labels, page language and colour contrast, explained plainly.
Accessibility isn't a separate audience — it's a subset of everyone
Screen-reader users, people navigating by keyboard, and people with low vision or color blindness aren't an edge case you can deprioritize until later — WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the widely adopted standard for making sure none of them hit a wall your other visitors never notice. The current version, WCAG 2.2, defines a Level AA bar that most legal accessibility requirements reference directly.
What a rules-based check can and can't catch
A handful of accessibility problems are structural and machine-checkable with high confidence: an image with no alt text, a form input with no associated label, a page missing its lang attribute, or text with insufficient contrast against its background. Those are exactly what an automated Lighthouse accessibility audit catches reliably. Plenty of accessibility work — is your custom dropdown actually operable by keyboard, does your focus order make sense — needs a real screen reader and a human pass, which is why a 90%+ automated score is a floor, not a finish line.
Common mistakes we see
- Decorative images with real alt text, and content images with none. Both directions are wrong — a screen reader user either hears noise for a spacer image, or silence where a meaningful graphic should have been described.
- Form inputs with a placeholder instead of a label. Placeholder text disappears the moment someone starts typing, and isn't reliably announced by a screen reader in the first place.
- Missing
langattribute on the<html>tag. Screen readers use it to choose the right pronunciation rules — without it, an English page can be read aloud with the wrong accent and cadence. - Low-contrast text used for style. Light gray text on a white background, common in minimalist designs, fails WCAG contrast ratios and is genuinely hard to read for a meaningful share of visitors, not just an edge case.
- Color as the only signal. A form error shown only as a red border, with no text or icon — invisible to a color-blind visitor, and to anyone relying on a screen reader.
How to check it yourself
Unplug your mouse and try to complete your own primary user flow using only the keyboard — Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter. Then run your page through Lighthouse's accessibility audit or the axe browser extension for the machine-checkable items, and read your own copy aloud imagining you can't see the layout around it, to catch anywhere meaning depends entirely on visual position or color.
What LaunchGraded actually checks here
These are scored automatically as part of the free scan — the list above is reasoning and context, this is the exact, deterministic checklist behind the score.
- People using assistive tech can use your site
- Images have text alternatives
- Form fields have labels
- The page declares its language
- Text is readable against its background