Review Accessibility Decisions

Surface the accessibility decisions that were made — deliberately or by default — in an existing feature, and document them before they get lost.

Process

Step 1: Identify Implicit Decisions

Walk through the feature and list every design choice that affects accessibility, even if nobody explicitly decided it:

How is keyboard navigation handled?
What happens with screen readers?
What colour and contrast choices were made?
How are errors communicated?
What motion and animation exists?
What user preferences are respected?

Many of these were never consciously decided — they were inherited from a framework, copied from another feature, or left at defaults. Those are still decisions. Document them.

Step 2: Assess Each Decision

For each identified decision, determine:

Was this intentional or accidental?
Does it meet current accessibility standards?
Who does it serve well? Who does it exclude?
Is there evidence behind it or was it arbitrary?

Step 3: Check for Undocumented Tradeoffs

Using tradeoff-analysis, identify decisions where accessibility was traded for something else:

Speed: "we didn't have time to make this keyboard accessible"
Complexity: "the accessible version was too hard to build"
Design: "the accessible version didn't look right"
Ignorance: "we didn't know this was an issue"

Document each with its current impact on users.

Step 4: Map Current Compliance

Using compliance-mapping, assess the feature's current state against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Identify conformance gaps.

Step 5: Catalogue Debt

Using accessibility-debt-tracking, create a debt record for every known issue discovered in this review.

Output

Deliver a decision review report:

Decision inventory — every accessibility-affecting decision found, marked as intentional or accidental
Undocumented tradeoffs — decisions where accessibility was sacrificed, with current user impact
Compliance gaps — WCAG criteria not currently met
Debt register — known issues with severity, owner, and recommended timeline
Recommendations — which decisions should be revisited first