About this lab
Accessibility is not a final checklist. It is a design practice, a prototyping method, and a way of making public digital work more usable, understandable, and humane.
Why this exists
Most accessibility tools focus on conventional websites and assume a technical audience. But a great deal of public digital work — art, education, civic media, community documents, creative code — is made by people without an accessibility specialist on hand. Many automated tools can identify common HTML issues; far fewer help artists, educators, journalists, and creative technologists evaluate canvas-based, document-based, or sensory-rich work.
This lab tries to close that gap: automated checks where automation is honest, human-review prompts where it isn't, and plain-language next steps everywhere — written to make repair feel doable, not shameful.
Accessibility as a prototyping practice
This project grew out of Accessible by Design, a hands-on workshop about prototyping with intention: make something, clarify what it is and how to use it, then expand who can use it. The lab is the workshop's toolbox — a way to fold accessibility into the making process instead of bolting it on at the end.
Facilitators are welcome to use it in classes, portfolio reviews, and creative coding sessions. Each report's "things only a person can check" section doubles as a set of discussion prompts.
What this tool is honest about
- Automated checks catch only part of the picture. They cannot replace testing with disabled users, screen reader review, or a full WCAG audit.
- The website quick check examines a fetched copy of a page and says so on every report it produces. The bookmark method is the accurate path.
- The PDF and sketch checks run entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded. The quick check's typed address passes through a public relay to fetch the page copy.
- A clean result is a good start, not a certification.
Open source
The lab is MIT-licensed. Developers can run the command-line version, read the audit methodology, and contribute new rules — especially for creative, civic, educational, and multimodal work — via the GitHub repository.
Created by Adekemi (Kemi) Hanna Sijuwade-Ukadike.