The fridge door test for web accessibility

Walls.io

1. Use high-contrast colours
2. The fridge door test ←

Copy-editing a book takes more skill, concentration and time than you expect. Self-publishing authors should therefore hire a third-party copy editor to make a good job of it.

For the same reason, I appreciate and thank the three readers of this blog who submit corrections after I publish an article without proof-reading it properly. Meanwhile, no-one appreciates it when someone asks you to copy-edit an essay, and you can see in the first sentence that they didn’t even use a spelling checker.

Kitchen hygiene lesson

Aged seventeen, I worked in a restaurant kitchen at weekends. Unlike my catering college colleagues, I lacked both skills and qualifications, not to mention motivation to learn the job before leaving for university. I did the obvious work, such as cleaning dirty plates and pans, but paid less attention to broad instructions, such as clean the whole kitchen.

My boss, Quentin, knew his way around a kitchen but rarely appeared in it, and when he did, he invariably found somebody doing something wrong. One Sunday lunchtime, he walked into the kitchen and asked me, ‘why haven’t you cleaned that fridge?’

I forget, of course, but cocky seventeen year-old me may have asked how he knew, without looking inside. ‘Easy,’ he said, ‘the outside of the door is dirty, and that’s the easiest part to clean. If you haven’t cleaned the outside, you obviously haven’t cleaned the inside.’ He knew.

Accessibility standards

In product companies, there’s a conversation about web accessibility that goes like this:

You: Our product isn’t accessible.

Them: How do you know? Did you do a full audit?

You: I don’t have to. We don’t even have sufficient text contrast.

You make a bold and potentially unhelpful claim when you say ‘it isn’t accessible’, much like submitting a bug that says, ‘it doesn’t work’. This inevitably leads to pushback from anyone whose job includes knowing things like where the accessibility issues lie. They assume that your imprecise claim lacks supporting evidence, and have also missed the point.

You don’t need to do a full audit when the first-and-easiest step fails. And even if you do plan to spend significant time conducting such an audit, you would do well to start with screening checks. Screening prevents wasting time on lazy or incompetent people: when basic checks fail, you expect the rest of the audit to fail too, because its checks require more effort to pass.

The minimum-effort signal

The spelling error, dirty fridge door and the poor text contrast all conveniently signal absent minimal effort. Used well, these signals justify both aborting expensive quality control early on, and asking creators to do their own checks.

In a more sophisticated move, you can create your own minimum-effort signals. For example, in a frequently-told story, Van Halen had a rider that required a bowl of M&Ms backstage, with the brown ones removed. As Snopes reported:

The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with.

Go and read the whole article, especially the quote from lead singer David Lee Roth’s autobiography at the bottom. And think about the minimum-effort signals in your product.