What is web accessibility? Why is it important to your business? How to make your website more accessible? Read this post for the answers.
As the world’s population ages and more and more people use the Internet, the need for accessibility grows. Not only does your website and application need to adapt to different browsers and speeds, it needs to adapt to the needs of those with visual, hearing, or other impairments. That’s why web accessibility is rapidly becoming a more important consideration when designing for today’s Internet.
A website is considered to be accessible if its content is easily available to everyone; no matter the level of impairment they might have. The World Wide Web Consortium has developed guidelines for making websites accessible. While the guidelines cover a wide range of accessibility issues, they can’t address the individual needs of every person. The goal is to present content in a way that is:
Visually impaired people can access their information with the help of “screen readers”. These programs read the printed text out loud, which helps unseeing people use computers and receive access to a text content of any kind. It also provides an opportunity to read a newspaper independently without waiting for expensive records and additional aids. They can just open the browser and listen to a screen-reader.
For people with physical disabilities, who can’t just pick up the paper and turn the pages they can get the access to online news portals with the help of their computer using technologies that were designed to adapt the computer interface to their disabilities.
People who are hard of hearing have always had the opportunity to read the papers on their own. However, when it comes to video materials, they can read typed versions of important speeches or watch multimedia content with subtitles.
Unfortunately, many designers aren’t aware of accessibility issues or don’t think that the population requiring special accessibility is large enough to invest the time and resources necessary to connect in a meaningful way.
That’s a mistake. It’s currently too large a population to be ignored and the growth trend is upwards. The World Health Organization estimates that there are about 285 million people in the world who are visually impaired. Estimates are that every day 100 more people begin to lose their sight. That’s an additional 36,500 people every year! The numbers represent real people; and that’s a huge number of people to ignore.
These numbers are only going to increase. Almost 90% of the population over the age of 65 has cataracts that affect color perception. The baby-boomer generation is aging and as they age they will encounter the normal vision and hearing problems associated with growing older. The baby-busters are hot on their heels and they are already voracious consumers of Internet content. That won’t change as they age.
In addition, many people with disabilities live in developing areas and are just now getting access to the Internet. As the internet penetrates deeper into these communities, you’ve got the opportunity to reach a larger audience if you’ve crafted your design to be accessible.
Just because a person has a vision, hearing, physical, or cognitive disability doesn’t mean that they don’t need access to your content. Making your design accessible won’t ruin the aesthetics or destroy functionality.
Just because a person has a vision, hearing, physical, or cognitive disability doesn’t mean they don’t need access to your content. Making your design accessible won’t ruin the aesthetics or destroy functionality. It helps more people use your website and makes the experience more resilient across devices, input methods, and assistive technologies.
Savvy teams use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the main reference point for accessible web design and development. WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C recommendation, while many legal and procurement requirements still reference earlier WCAG versions. For example, the revised U.S. Section 508 standards are still based on WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements. In practice, this means teams should understand both the current WCAG guidance and the specific compliance standard required for a project.
You may ask, ‘How exactly will I benefit from accessibility?’ or ‘Why should I worry about making my site more accessible?’ Here are a couple of reasons why it is important to make your site more accessible for people with disabilities.
If you do not feel the need to make your website more accessible, then you’re excluding a large amount of potential visitors to your website.
The web is there to provide information to everyone. There will definitely be people in your audience who are not able to see, hear or simply pick up the mouse, and it is up to you to make your website more accessible for them.
By making your website more accessible you will increase the customer satisfaction and, thus, improve or regain your website’s reputation.
Making your web site more accessible will not only benefit people with disabilities. Increased usability ensures that your visitors can carry out their tasks effectively and efficiently.
Accessibility and SEO often support each other, but accessibility does not automatically guarantee higher rankings. Clear headings, descriptive link text, meaningful alt text, readable content, and clean HTML can help both users and search engines understand a page better. For images specifically, Google uses alt text together with page content and other signals to understand the image. So accessibility work can support SEO, but it should not be presented as a direct ranking shortcut.
People are all equal in their rights to receive information. It doesn’t matter if they speak a different language, have a certain disability, or lack access to a certain technology. Choosing to make your website more accessible to all your visitors goes to show that you really care about your audience.
People with visual disabilities may use screen reader apps to help them cruise the net and consume content. It’s important to keep in mind the requirements of screen-reader apps as well as the needs of the person using the app. Here are a few tips for website design.
If you are a fan of WordPress themes, start with the one that has been tagged as accessibility-ready. These themes already take many of the following guidelines into consideration. Make use of the WP-Accessibility Plugin too.
Make sure you use a consistent layout. The main elements such as navigation and banners should appear in the same locations on every page. Make sure your markup is consistent as well. There should be only one h1 element per page and the content should be similar to the page’s title. Remember to use headings in the proper order.
Alternative text tags are for more than SEO. They should provide a textual and contextual description of the image. If the image is just decorative, you can handle it with CSS. If it contains content, the alt text should describe the function of the link and not the image itself. Remember that the text should allow a person who can’t see the image to get the same information as a person who can see it.
Keep forms as short as possible. Only ask for the information you need. Users with all levels of ability will appreciate this. If there are errors in the fields when the form is submitted, make sure the error is clearly indicated. General error messages can be hard enough for site visitors without disabilities to decipher. Make sure the error message clearly indicates which field in the form needs to be corrected.
Avoid using nested data tables. Visitors using assistive technologies may have problems navigating between cells. Include a brief summary of the table’s content in the summary text box.
Video players and audio players should not be set to auto-play. Include closed captioning for videos and transcripts for audio files for the hearing impaired.
Don’t let color be the only way you convey information. For example, if you rely on color alone to show hyperlinks, your color blind audience might not be able to tell the difference in text. Did you know that almost 8% of the male population is color blind? Use underlines or borders to indicate links. Be mindful of the amount of contrast you use for the background color and the text color.
Don’t include pages that automatically reload on a periodic basis. Not all readers or screen readers will cover the material quickly and the user may not have finished reading the text before the page refreshes. Imagine how frustrating that would be!
We understand that you want your designs to reach as many people as possible. When you start your order, you can specify accessibility requirements for your project, including WCAG-oriented development or Section 508-related requirements where relevant. Our team can help convert your design into clean HTML/CSS that works across modern browsers and supports common assistive technology needs.
Accessibility still requires clear project requirements, proper design decisions, semantic markup, keyboard-friendly interactions, readable content, and testing. We can help with the development side so your team has a stronger technical foundation for an accessible website.
If you need help turning an existing design into clean, accessible, production-ready front-end code, explore our front-end development services.
Start with the issues that can block people from using the site at all: navigation, forms, headings, image descriptions, color contrast, and media access. These are usually easier to audit before a redesign than after the new layout has already been approved.
A practical first check should cover whether the site can be used with a keyboard, whether page headings follow a logical order, whether important images have useful alt text, whether form fields have clear labels and error messages, and whether videos have captions or transcripts. Also check if color alone is used to show links, errors, or status changes.
For a redesign, the highest-value move is to audit reusable templates and components first. If the navigation, forms, buttons, modals, and content blocks are accessible, many page-level problems become easier to prevent later.
Developer help is usually needed when the accessibility issue sits in markup, templates, components, JavaScript behavior, or form logic. Content and marketing teams can usually handle copy-level issues, but only if the CMS gives them enough control.
Marketers and content teams can often fix alt text, vague link labels, heading structure inside page content, transcripts, captions, and instructions that rely too much on color. Developers usually need to handle keyboard navigation, focus states, semantic HTML, ARIA usage, form validation, table markup, accessible menus, modals, sliders, and media player behavior.
The practical risk is ownership confusion. A content team may improve copy while the template still breaks screen reader navigation. A developer may build accessible components, but editors can later damage them with poor headings or unclear links. Those template-level issues belong in the front-end development scope, not in a simple content cleanup task.
Agencies should include accessibility requirements as production acceptance criteria, not as a loose note in the design handoff. If the requirement is not visible in the handoff, it is easy for developers to treat accessibility as a best-effort QA item instead of part of the build scope.
A useful handoff should specify the target standard, expected contrast behavior, focus states, hover states, error states, keyboard behavior, form labels, media requirements, and any components that need special attention, such as menus, filters, modals, tabs, accordions, or carousels.
For GetDevDone-style delivery work, the most useful handoffs are specific enough to remove guessing. For example, do not only say “make forms accessible.” Include how errors should be shown, what text should be announced, whether fields are required, and how success or failure states should behave.
Accessibility adds much less time when it is planned from the start than when it is added after the build. The extra effort depends on the number of templates, the complexity of interactive components, the amount of media, the state of the content, and how deeply the project needs to be tested.
For a simple marketing site with clean designs and standard components, accessibility may mostly affect implementation discipline and QA. For a site with complex forms, filters, dashboards, ecommerce flows, custom JavaScript, or third-party widgets, accessibility can become a real scope item.
Agencies should not estimate accessibility as a fixed percentage. A better method is to flag risky components during handoff, include accessibility checks in staging QA, and avoid leaving all issues for pre-launch review. Late fixes are usually slower because they can reopen design, development, content, and QA at the same time.
Adding accessibility after launch often turns a planned quality requirement into rework. Some fixes are simple, such as improving alt text or link wording. Others can require changes to templates, components, JavaScript behavior, form validation, or even the design system.
The biggest risk is that inaccessible patterns are repeated across the site. If one menu, form component, card, modal, or accordion is flawed, the same issue may appear on dozens of pages. Fixing the pattern later is possible, but it can affect styling, QA, content, and client approvals.
For agencies, the business risk is margin loss. The client may see accessibility as something that should have been included, while the production team sees it as a new requirement. That gap is avoidable if accessibility expectations are named before design approval and development kickoff.
No, an accessibility-ready theme is a useful starting point, not a guarantee that the final website is accessible. The theme can provide better baseline markup and keyboard-friendly patterns, but the finished site still depends on configuration, content, plugins, custom code, and editorial choices.
A WordPress theme may handle basic structure well, while a page builder block, third-party plugin, custom form, color change, image upload, or embedded video creates new accessibility problems. Editors can also weaken accessibility after launch by using headings out of order, writing poor alt text, or adding vague links.
The practical takeaway is to treat the theme as one layer. The final site still needs content review, component testing, keyboard checks, and screen reader-aware QA on the actual pages users will visit.
For new or updated websites, WCAG 2.2 is the best general reference unless a contract, market, or legal requirement specifies something else. WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 are still valid W3C recommendations, but WCAG 2.2 is the newer version and is the safer planning target for teams updating accessibility requirements now.
Section 508 should not be treated as a universal website standard. It is mainly relevant to US federal agencies and certain ICT procurement contexts. In EU-facing projects, teams may also need to consider EN 301 549 or European Accessibility Act obligations, especially for consumer digital services such as ecommerce. That does not mean every brochure website has the same legal exposure.
For most practical website work, use WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the working target, then adjust based on the client’s market, legal counsel, procurement requirements, and product type. GetDevDone also has a separate overview of WCAG 2.2 updates if the team needs a quick reference before scoping.
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