Before you share what a helper made: six accessibility checks
Originally published on WordPress on October 5, 2026.
A helper produces a handsome one-page flyer, a slide deck or a small web page. It looks good on your screen. Then a colleague who uses a screen reader opens it, or someone prints it in black and white, or it is read on a phone in bright sunlight, and it turns out that the good looks were doing a lot of the work.
Accessibility is not a separate project. It is a short list of checks that make a document, a slide or an app easier for everyone to use, and most of them take a few minutes and no special tools. They apply whoever made the thing: a colleague, a designer or an AI assistant. The examples below are illustrative.
Check 1: Can you follow it without color?
Print the page in grayscale, or take a screenshot and turn the color off. If a chart’s meaning depends on telling red from green, add labels, patterns or direct text. If a warning appears only in red, add the word “warning”. Color makes a poor sole carrier of meaning: some readers cannot tell certain colors apart, and printers and bright screens flatten the rest.
Check 2: Is there a real heading structure?
Headings should be real headings, not larger bold text, so that people using assistive tools can jump through the page. Check that the order makes sense: one main title, then sections, then subsections. If the file came from a template, the template may already have the styles. Ask for them to be used.
Check 3: Does every image say what it is for?
Images that carry meaning need a short description. “Chart: sales rise from March to June” is more useful than “chart.png”. Decorative images need none, and they should be marked so that tools skip them. If you cannot describe an image in one sentence, it may not be doing its job.
Check 4: Is the text large enough, with enough contrast?
Look at the page at arm’s length, or on a phone. Light gray on white is the usual culprit. Body text should be comfortably readable at ordinary size without squinting. If you have to lean in, so will other people. Many tools include a contrast checker, and running it takes about a minute.
Check 5: Do links and buttons say where they go?
“Click here” means nothing to a person who hears the links on a page read out as a list. Use words like “Read the schedule” or “Download the form”. The same goes for buttons: a button should say what happens when you press it.
Check 6: Does it work without a mouse?
For anything interactive, try to get through it with the keyboard alone: tab to move, enter to select. If you get stuck, or cannot see where you are, a person who navigates this way will be stuck too. Also check that anything that moves or plays on its own can be paused.
A hypothetical pass, and what to put in the brief
A flyer for an event goes through the checks. Grayscale shows that the “sold out” notice was only in red, so the words are added. The heading is just large text, so it becomes a real heading. The photo gets a one-line description. The link “click here” becomes “See the program”. Four fixes in fifteen minutes, and the flyer works better for everyone, including the person reading it on a bright afternoon. Next time, put the checks in the brief: real headings, descriptions for meaningful images, links that say where they go and no information carried by color alone. The helper does the first pass, and you do the spot check on top.
Where Octuo fits
We’re the Octuo team. Octuo is a personal assistant and one starting point for work across AI, tools and specialist services. You can have it build small apps by describing them, on a Canvas that it can also see and operate, so the description is the right place to ask for readable, keyboard-friendly screens. It reports back when a job is done. Octuo is available for macOS.