Web accessibility

Web accessibility is the practice of building so that people with disabilities can use what you built — operating the site by keyboard alone, reading it with a screen reader, understanding it at high zoom or with low colour vision. WCAG is the standard that defines what this means in testable terms, with levels A, AA and AAA.

In the European Union it is no longer only good practice. Public sector bodies are already bound, and the European Accessibility Act extends obligations to a wide range of consumer-facing digital products and services, with AA as the practical benchmark.

Retrofitting accessibility is several times more expensive than building it in, because the fixes are structural rather than cosmetic — semantic markup, focus management, sensible headings, real labels on form fields. Treating it as a launch checklist item is how it becomes a rebuild.