When we talk about website accessibility, we're talking about making your website usable for everyone—including the one in four adults in the United States who has a disability. That's over 60 million people in the US alone. Globally, about 15% of the population, more than a billion people, live with some form of disability. If your website isn't accessible, you're effectively putting up a "closed" sign for a significant portion of potential customers.
But accessibility isn't just about reaching more customers. It's increasingly a legal requirement, with growing consequences for businesses that fail to comply. And beyond legal obligations, accessible design simply produces better websites—websites that work better for everyone, not just users with disabilities.
Understanding Why Accessibility Matters
The case for website accessibility rests on three pillars: legal requirements, business benefits, and ethical responsibility.
Legal Requirements and Risks
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, and courts have increasingly interpreted this to include websites. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act explicitly requires federal agencies and their contractors to maintain accessible digital content. Various state laws add additional requirements.
The legal landscape has shifted dramatically. Over 4,000 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2023 alone, and the numbers continue to grow. Businesses of all sizes have faced legal action—not just large corporations, but small businesses, local restaurants, and online retailers. The settlements and judgments can be substantial, and the ongoing compliance requirements add further costs.
Even if you've avoided legal action so far, operating an inaccessible website creates ongoing legal exposure. The law is trending toward more enforcement, not less, and waiting for a lawsuit to prompt action is an expensive and reactive approach.
Business Benefits
Beyond avoiding legal problems, accessible websites perform better across multiple dimensions. The 15% of the global population with disabilities represents enormous purchasing power—over $8 trillion annually. Creating barriers to this market segment through inaccessible design is simply bad business.
Accessible design also improves search engine optimization. Search engines can't see images, so they rely on alt text to understand visual content. They can't parse poorly structured pages, so semantic HTML helps them understand your content hierarchy. Many accessibility best practices directly improve your technical SEO.
Perhaps most importantly, accessible design creates better user experiences for everyone. Captions help users in noisy environments or those who can't play audio. High contrast benefits users in bright sunlight. Clear navigation helps everyone find what they're looking for. The improvements you make for accessibility benefit all users, not just those with disabilities.
Ethical Responsibility
The web was created to be universally accessible—that's fundamental to its design and mission. Excluding people from accessing information, services, and commerce because of disability contradicts the web's foundational principles. Building accessible websites isn't just good business; it's the right thing to do.
Understanding WCAG: The POUR Principles
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), provide the international standard for web accessibility. These guidelines are organized around four core principles, commonly remembered by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
Perceivable
Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means content can't rely exclusively on a single sense—visual information needs alternatives for users who can't see, audio information needs alternatives for users who can't hear.
Text alternatives for images allow screen readers to describe visual content to blind users. Captions for videos serve deaf users and those who can't play audio. Sufficient color contrast ensures text is readable for users with low vision or color blindness. Multiple presentation options ensure that no matter how users perceive content, they can access the information.
Operable
User interface components and navigation must be operable—users must be able to interact with all functionality. This means interfaces can't require specific physical capabilities that some users may lack.
Keyboard accessibility is central to operability. Users who can't use a mouse due to motor disabilities, blindness, or other conditions navigate using keyboards or keyboard-like devices. Every interactive element must be reachable and usable via keyboard alone. Users need enough time to complete tasks—content that times out too quickly creates barriers. Navigation must be clear and consistent so users can find their way around.
Understandable
Information and operation of the user interface must be understandable. Content should be readable and clear, not requiring specialized knowledge or exceptional reading ability. Interfaces should behave predictably so users know what to expect.
Clear, simple language helps users with cognitive disabilities and benefits everyone. Consistent navigation and interaction patterns help users build mental models of how your site works. Error prevention and clear error messages help users avoid and recover from mistakes.
Robust
Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This requires clean, valid code that follows web standards and doesn't break when accessed through screen readers, voice control, or other assistive tools.
Semantic HTML—using elements according to their meaning, not just their appearance—provides the structure assistive technologies need. ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes add additional context where native HTML falls short. Regular testing with actual assistive technologies ensures compatibility.
Quick Wins for Improving Accessibility
Comprehensive accessibility requires ongoing attention, but certain improvements provide significant benefit with relatively little effort.
1. Alt Text for Images
Every meaningful image on your website needs descriptive alternative text (alt text) that conveys the image's content or function. When a screen reader encounters an image, it reads the alt text aloud, so users understand what the image shows.
Good alt text describes the content of the image, not just its presence. "Photo of a person" tells users almost nothing; "Customer service representative smiling while helping a customer on the phone" paints a picture. For images that serve a function (like buttons or links), describe the function rather than the image appearance—"Submit form" rather than "Blue arrow button."
Decorative images that don't add meaningful content should have empty alt attributes (alt="") so screen readers skip them entirely rather than announcing unhelpful information.
2. Sufficient Color Contrast
Text must have sufficient contrast against its background for users with low vision or color blindness to read it. WCAG specifies minimum contrast ratios: 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18 point or 14 point bold).
These aren't arbitrary numbers—they're based on research into visual perception and legibility. Many designs that look fine to people with normal vision become unreadable for users with visual impairments. Light gray text on white backgrounds, trendy low-contrast designs, and text over busy image backgrounds all frequently fail accessibility requirements.
Use contrast checking tools (available in browser developer tools and numerous free online checkers) to verify your color combinations meet the required ratios.
3. Complete Keyboard Accessibility
Every interactive element on your website—links, buttons, form fields, menus, modal dialogs—must be usable via keyboard alone. Users navigate using the Tab key to move between elements, Enter or Space to activate them, and arrow keys for certain components like menus.
Test your site by putting away your mouse and navigating with only the keyboard. Can you reach every interactive element? Can you activate every button and follow every link? Can you open and close menus? Can you complete forms and submit them?
Visible focus indicators are essential so keyboard users can see where they are on the page. The browser provides default focus styles, but many designers remove them for aesthetic reasons without providing alternatives. This makes keyboard navigation impossible. Either keep the browser defaults or implement custom focus styles that are clearly visible.
4. Proper Form Labels
Every form field needs a label that's programmatically associated with it—not just text that appears near the field, but an actual HTML label element connected via the "for" attribute. Screen readers announce these labels when users navigate to form fields, so users know what information to enter.
Placeholder text is not an adequate substitute for labels. Placeholders disappear when users start typing, leaving them without a reminder of what the field requires. Users with cognitive disabilities or anyone who gets interrupted while filling out a form loses context. Always provide visible labels in addition to any placeholder text.
5. Logical Heading Structure
Headings (H1 through H6) create structure that screen reader users rely on for navigation. Many blind users navigate pages by jumping between headings to get an overview of the content, similar to how sighted users scan a page visually.
Use headings in logical order—H1 for the main page title, H2 for major sections, H3 for subsections, and so on. Don't skip levels (jumping from H2 to H4, for example), and don't use headings just because you want larger or bolder text. Each page should have exactly one H1 that describes the page's main topic.
6. Descriptive Link Text
Link text should make sense out of context. Screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of all links on a page, or by tabbing through links one by one. In this context, "Click here," "Learn more," or "Read more" tells them nothing about where the link leads.
Instead of "To learn about our services, click here," write "Learn about our web design services." Instead of "Read more," write "Read our guide to SEO basics." The link text alone should convey the destination.
Testing for Accessibility
Accessibility testing should combine automated tools with manual verification and, ideally, user testing with people who have disabilities.
Automated testing tools like WAVE, Google Lighthouse, and axe can scan your pages and identify many common accessibility issues—missing alt text, insufficient contrast, missing form labels, and more. These tools are fast and catch obvious problems, making them excellent for regular checks.
However, automated tools can only catch perhaps 30-40% of accessibility issues. They can verify that an image has alt text but can't judge whether that text is meaningfully descriptive. They can't fully evaluate keyboard navigation flows or assess whether content is genuinely understandable.
Manual testing fills these gaps. Navigate your site using only a keyboard. Turn on a screen reader (VoiceOver on Mac, NVDA or JAWS on Windows) and experience your site the way blind users do. Zoom your browser to 200% and see if the layout remains usable. These manual tests reveal issues automated tools miss.
The gold standard is testing with actual users who have disabilities. Watching someone who uses a screen reader daily navigate your site reveals friction points and opportunities that no other testing method can uncover.
A Warning About Accessibility Overlays
You may have encountered accessibility overlay widgets—tools that claim to make websites accessible by adding a toolbar that users can use to adjust fonts, colors, and other settings. These products are heavily marketed and may seem like an easy solution. They are not.
Overlay widgets don't fix the underlying code problems that make websites inaccessible. A screen reader will still stumble on missing alt text, improper heading structure, and inaccessible forms regardless of what overlay widget is installed. In fact, overlays can actively interfere with assistive technologies, making the experience worse for the users they claim to help.
Courts and regulators have not accepted overlays as evidence of accessibility compliance. Businesses using overlays have been sued successfully for accessibility violations. The disability community largely views overlay products negatively, seeing them as bandaids that allow companies to avoid doing the real work of accessibility.
Genuine accessibility requires fixing issues at the code level. There are no shortcuts. Overlay products may provide a false sense of compliance while failing to address actual barriers and potentially increasing legal risk.
Ready to make your website accessible to everyone? Let's discuss how to build accessibility into your site the right way.