Roger at 456 Berea Street recommends that developers use the fangs plugin to assess accessibility and I fully concur with him. What the plugin does is to give you a representation of how screen readers will see your site. I have been using the Lynx browser to try and emulate this but this is much better.

Roger writes a very thorough article on the coding methods he recommends and I recommend reading it.

For the record here’s my basic checklist:

• Never use frames
• Give all images meaningful alt text
• Don’t repeat link names in the title tag
• Validate XHTML at the W3C XHTML Validation Service
• Validate CSS at the W3C CSS Validation Service
• Avoid using tables unless strictly necessary
• Check tabbing control
• Check site on different browsers and operating systems.
• Assess site appearance without stylesheets
• Assess download speeds
• and now… Check the site in Fangs