Be excellent to each other.
Accessibility has finally found its way into the conversation and is (thankfully) being taken with the care it deserves. Website accessibility is an umbrella term for making a website usable by as many people as possible, regardless of ability.
It’s very common to fall into the trap of building a website for ourselves. We treat ourselves as the primary user, and that presents obvious problems. Usually this gets framed as a business issue (you’re losing sales), but on a moral level it’s deeper: you may be restricting content and services from people with extremely common physical and cognitive challenges.
The good news is that many barriers can be removed with a little forethought—and you might accidentally make your website better for everyone in the process.
What types of accessibility challenges are we talking about?
Accessibility issues are often overlooked because it doesn’t feel like there are many people who would benefit. Look closer, and you realise these challenges affect a sizeable portion of the population.
Visual
Because the web is a visual medium, this is the category most people think of first. There are tools that help visually impaired users navigate websites, but work still needs to be done on the site itself to ensure it plays nicely with those tools.
It also doesn’t stop at blindness. We need to account for lower visual acuity, colour blindness, and low contrast.
Auditory
A few years ago, companies pushing video made the miraculous discovery that video often “performs” better than text. That shift made video more ubiquitous across the web—and it introduced obvious hurdles for hearing‑impaired users.
Neurological and cognitive
Accessibility isn’t only about the function of eyes and ears. It’s also about how information is processed and interpreted. With neurological or cognitive challenges, the senses may work typically, but the interpretation can be difficult.
Dyslexia is one example: the user can see and read, but the appearance of characters becomes problematic. Other issues can include difficulty focusing, difficulty parsing complex information, or a need for content to be structured more clearly.
Physical
Imagine trying to operate a mouse with a prominent tremor—or without the use of your hand at all. Some users rely on adaptive hardware, alternative pointers, switch controls, voice control, or other assistive inputs. Your UI either works with them… or it doesn’t.
The good reasons to take accessibility seriously
It’s decent
The simplest argument is that it’s just a decent thing to do. Nobody should experience restrictions on the web based on biology or circumstance. We’d be bothered if an important building didn’t have wheelchair ramps, but we don’t always extend the same concern online—largely because the struggle is out of sight.
There’s more than you realise
People with disabilities are commonly overlooked unless you work directly in that space. This goes doubly for challenges that aren’t immediately obvious, like colour blindness or dyslexia. That means there are large groups of people who benefit from accessibility work even when you don’t “see” them.
Colour blindness alone affects a meaningful portion of the population (commonly cited around 8% of males and 0.5% of females). Not accounting for it is a massive miss.
It’s good UX
Accessibility and user experience are close cousins. UX (unfairly boiled down) is the practice of figuring out the best way to do a thing. For accessibility, it means figuring out how to serve content to people who experience the world differently.
And here’s the sneaky part: what improves the experience for some often improves it for many.
Find the right contrast level so text stands out for someone with low visual acuity? Great. Does it also help someone with perfect vision reading on a phone in bright sunlight? Yep.
The colder reasons to take accessibility seriously (that are still important)
It’s good business
Let’s not forget everyone’s favourite marketing deity: Google.
Google’s north star is whether content is helpful. That usually means content that’s clear, well‑structured, and accessible. If your site blocks users (or assistive tech) from understanding your content, you’re not only excluding people—you’re also sabotaging discoverability.
A quick example: images. Screen readers can’t interpret an image unless you provide meaningful alternative text. If you skip alt text, blind users lose context… and you’ll also annoy Google. If there’s a golden rule, it’s this: don’t make Google furious.
It helps across devices
The era of “looks good on a desktop monitor” ended a long time ago. Phones forced responsive design, and now we view content on everything from TVs to watches. Content needs to be flexible and resilient.
As we develop tools that help people navigate physical and cognitive barriers, that flexibility becomes even more important. If the goal is to reach as many people as possible, reduce anything that gets in the way.
In some cases, you have to
For many larger organisations—especially those connected to government—accessibility isn’t optional. Procurement often includes accessibility requirements. Some vendors and partners simply aren’t allowed to purchase goods or services from companies that don’t meet standards.
If none of the “good” reasons convince you, the business stick might.
OK, I’m convinced. When do we start?
Ideally, accessibility work happens from the beginning. It’s harder (and more expensive) to retrofit into a system that’s already live. That said, if you’re already up and running, it’s still worth doing.
This works best when there’s buy‑in from every level. Web projects have many players. If you’re hiring, accessibility should be part of your vetting process—and not just a box someone claims to check.
It also requires ego management:
- A designer may have built something beautiful, but if it excludes people, sacrifices are required.
- A developer may have built something cool, but if not everyone can operate it, it needs rethinking.
- A manager (or you) may be under a deadline, but shipping something unusable for many is not a win.
Let’s fix some problems
We’ve already identified groups who benefit from accessibility improvements. Here are some practical questions to ask of your website.
Visually impaired
- Does the layout break if someone uses a screen magnifier?
- Was the colour scheme created with colour blindness in mind?
- If you use subtle shade variations to communicate hierarchy, would anything critical be missed by someone with low contrast sensitivity?
Hearing impaired
- If you publish video, do you provide captions—and are they synced properly?
- Are the captions accurate, or did you auto‑generate them and call it a day?
- Are volume controls obvious for users who need different audio levels?
- Can you provide a transcript so users don’t have to use video?
- For live situations, can you provide a sign‑language option when accurate captions/transcripts aren’t feasible?
Neurological and cognitive
- Is your text styling locked down so tightly that dyslexic users can’t switch to a font that helps them read?
- Can you offer options beyond text—like colour and background adjustments?
- Is navigation clear and concise, or does it force users to process too much at once?
Physical
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Do you require high‑precision actions (like a tiny close button on a modal) for no good reason?
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Have you implemented any “scroll‑jacking” or weird navigation that forces users into motor gymnastics?
These tricks can look cute and flashy, but they’re often just a designer or developer waving their tail in your face and bragging about how clever they are. Don’t let them (or make them) do that.
Conclusion
This barely scratches the surface, but it’s a logical starting point: understand the problem, understand who it affects, and start removing barriers.
The web was promised as a way to free us all and put us on a more even playing field. That hasn’t exactly worked out across the board—but we still owe it to our fellow citizens to try.