I've been writing Angular for ten years, and for most of them I treated accessibility the way nearly everyone does: as a thing I'd "get to" once the feature worked. It always lost the race to the deadline.
What changed my mind wasn't guilt — it was realising why a11y keeps getting skipped. It's not neglect. It's that accessibility is genuinely hard to hold in your head while you're also wrangling state, layout, and a ticket that was due yesterday. You can't fix "I forgot" with willpower. You fix it with a checklist.
So here's the one I actually use before a component ships. It's WCAG AA-oriented, Angular-specific, and ordered the way bugs actually show up. One thing up front, because it's the whole reason a list like this exists:
Automated tools catch maybe 30–40% of WCAG issues. AXE, Lighthouse and the rest are brilliant at the mechanical stuff — a missing alt, a contrast ratio, a duplicate id. They cannot tell you whether your tab order makes sense, whether your focus goes somewhere useful after a dialog closes, or whether your aria-live region actually announces anything. A green AXE run is the floor, not the finish line. I've marked each item below with whether a tool will catch it (🤖) or whether it's on you (👤).
