Web Accessibility That Actually Matters

Why bother, honestly

Three reasons, in the order that persuades most business owners. It is a meaningful share of your market — around one in five people has a disability, and a larger group benefits from the same changes. It improves the site for everyone, because the fixes are mostly clarity. And in many markets it is a legal obligation with real enforcement.

The reason we lead with is the second. Good contrast, labelled forms and a sensible heading structure make a site easier for a tired person on a phone in the sun, which is most of your traffic.

The six changes that cover most of it

1. Colour contrast. Light grey on white fails and is everywhere. Fixing it is a stylesheet change.
2. Keyboard access. Everything clickable must be reachable and operable by keyboard, including menus and modals.
3. Labelled form fields. A placeholder is not a label. This breaks screen readers and confuses everyone when the placeholder vanishes.
4. Alt text on meaningful images. Describe the content; decorative images get empty alt.
5. Heading structure. One H1, then a real hierarchy. Not headings chosen for their font size.
6. Visible focus. Never remove the focus outline without replacing it with something clearer.

Roughly 80% of the accessibility failures we find on business sites are in that list, and all six are cheap to fix during a build.

What it costs

Built in from the start, accessibility adds around 5–10% to a project — mostly design decisions and testing time. Retrofitted onto a finished site, it costs considerably more, because some fixes require rebuilding components.

On overlay widgets

The plug-in that promises instant compliance does not deliver it. Disability advocacy groups oppose them, they frequently interfere with the assistive technology people already use, and lawsuits have proceeded against sites using them.

They exist because the promise is attractive. There is no substitute for fixing the underlying markup, and a supplier who recommends an overlay instead of remediation is selling comfort rather than access.

Testing without a specialist

• Unplug the mouse and use the site — you will find problems within a minute
• Run an automated checker; it catches perhaps 30% of issues and they are real ones
• Zoom to 200% and check nothing breaks or overlaps
• Turn on your operating system's screen reader and try one journey
• Check contrast on every text and background pair in the design system

Automated tools are a floor, not a ceiling. They cannot judge whether alt text is useful or whether the tab order makes sense, and both matter more than the things they catch.

Where the legal position actually stands

Public sector bodies in the UK and EU have explicit obligations. Private businesses have general duties under equality legislation that courts have applied to websites, and in the US a large volume of litigation targets private sites.

We are not lawyers and this is not advice. The practical position is that the six fixes above remove most real barriers and most realistic exposure, and they are cheap enough that the legal question rarely needs to be the deciding one.

Frequently asked questions