Accessibility is often treated as a specialist topic for a small audience. It is neither. It is a set of practical habits that make a product usable by more people, in more situations, and most of them cost nothing when they are done from the start.

Who it is for

Some people cannot use a mouse and navigate entirely by keyboard. Some use a screen reader, which reads the page aloud. Some have low vision or cannot tell certain colours apart.

Others are affected only for a while or in a particular moment: a broken wrist, a phone in bright sunlight, one hand holding a child. A product that works for the first group works better for all of them.

What WCAG is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard, published by the W3C. They come in three levels: A, AA and AAA. AA is the level most organisations aim for, and the one regulations usually refer to.

The guidelines rest on four ideas. People must be able to perceive the content, operate the interface, understand it, and use it with the technology they rely on.

The failures that come up most

  • Text without enough contrast against its background.
  • Form fields with no label a screen reader can announce.
  • Images with no text description.
  • Controls that cannot be reached or used with a keyboard.
  • No visible indication of where the keyboard focus is.
  • Meaning carried by colour alone, such as red for an error with no text.
  • Buttons and links too small to tap reliably.

Fixing this short list resolves most of what an audit will find.

How to check

  • Run an automated checker. It finds contrast and labelling problems quickly, though not everything.
  • Put the mouse aside and use the product with the keyboard alone.
  • Try the main journey with a screen reader.
  • Zoom the page to twice its size and see what breaks.

Automated tools catch only part of the picture. The keyboard test takes ten minutes and finds problems no tool reports.

Build it in

Accessibility added at the end means reopening finished work. Built in, it is mostly invisible effort: a component is made accessible once, in the design system, and every screen that uses it inherits the result.

It also needs to stay in. A check in each release, and a habit of testing new features by keyboard, keeps a product from drifting back.

Why it is worth doing

In many countries accessibility is a legal requirement for certain kinds of organisation, and that list tends to grow. Beyond the law, the same practices make a product clearer and easier for everyone: readable text, forms that explain themselves, pages that work on any device.

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