The accessibility checklist: evaluating digital-skills tools for every learner

Evidence grade: standards-based practice guidance. The checklist translates established accessibility standards (WCAG's perceivable/operable/understandable frame) and the SEN pages' research (dyslexia, motor accommodations) into procurement-time questions a teacher can answer in twenty minutes without an audit budget. Position note: we grade ourselves against it at the end, gaps included.

Accessibility evaluation usually arrives as either a compliance PDF nobody reads or nothing at all. Classrooms need the middle artifact: a short checklist that catches the exclusions that actually happen, testable by a teacher with the product open. Organized by what can fail:

Can every child perceive it?

Text scales without breaking layouts (browser zoom to 200% is the twenty-second test).
Contrast holds — grey-on-white instruction text fails real children before it fails any audit.
Sound is never the only channel: anything spoken or signalled by audio also appears visibly (classrooms are loud; some ears don't work; speakers get muted).
Colour is never the only signal — the red-vs-green tell excludes the roughly 1-in-12 boys (in European-ancestry populations; somewhat fewer elsewhere) with colour-vision deficiency; look for a second cue (shape, label, position) on every colour-coded state.
Read-aloud support for instructions — for pre-readers, dyslexic learners, and EAL students alike; ideally per-element, not page-firehose.

Can every child operate it?

Keyboard-reachable controls and no forced precision: generous targets, adjustable expectations — watch for tiny close-together targets and drag-only interactions with no click alternative.
No time pressure, or defeatable time pressure — timers punish motor and processing differences first (the par argument is an accessibility argument too).
OS accessibility settings survive: the product respects Sticky Keys, key-repeat settings, system zoom — test with Sticky Keys on; a shortcut task that fights it has chosen its answer.
Error tolerance: mistakes cost retries, not restarts.

Can every child understand it?

Instructions in child-plain language, one step visible at a time where tasks are long (cognitive load is an accessibility dimension).
Predictable structure — consistent layouts and navigation lower the orientation tax that hits some children hardest.
Progress is legible — signals a child can explain serve exactly the learners vague dashboards lose.

The process questions (for the vendor)

Ask for the accessibility statement or VPAT/WCAG conformance claim — its existence and honesty (real ones admit gaps) tells you the maturity; ask "what's your keyboard-only path through a lesson?" (the structural-probe style question — fluency in the answer is the signal); and ask how accommodations interact with reporting — an accommodated child's progress should read as progress, not as an asterisk.

What this doesn't cover

Formal audits, screen-reader depth (full non-visual operability is a specialist evaluation beyond this checklist), and individual-child fit — the checklist screens products; the SEN pages and your learning-support colleagues fit them to children.

How we score against it (honestly)

Strong: no timers anywhere, unlimited retries, generous mouse targets — with a per-child big-targets setting teachers can switch on (a comfort preference that changes nothing about goals or scoring), read-aloud on instructions and tasks, colour never sole signal in task goals, consistent realm structure, plain-language instructions, progress signals with checkable meanings — and shortcut tasks accept sequenced chords (press the modifier, release, then the key: a visible "held for you" latch), so Sticky-Keys-style input works with or without the OS setting. Gap, on the record: full screen-reader operability is unverified. A code-level audit has been done (live regions on task feedback, labelled controls, keyboard paths for pointer interactions where the pointer isn't the skill being taught) — but code audits are not the same as testing with actual assistive technology and real users, so until that happens, treat non-visual operation as unsupported and plan provision accordingly.

References

W3C — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — the perceivable/operable/understandable/robust frame this checklist translates.
CAST — Universal Design for Learning Guidelines — the multiple-means principle behind the perception and cognition sections.
Blank, R., et al. (2019). DCD clinical recommendations — the operate-section's evidence base, via motor accommodations.

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