What is website accessibility?
Building sites everyone can use, including people with visual, motor, hearing or cognitive differences. It's a legal duty, and it's just better design.
Website accessibility means designing and building so that everyone can use your site, including people who navigate with a keyboard, use a screen reader, can’t see colour the way you do, or need more time and clarity.
Why it matters
- It’s the right thing to do. A meaningful share of every audience has a disability of some kind.
- It’s often a legal requirement. Standards like WCAG underpin accessibility law in the UK, EU and beyond.
- It’s better for everyone. Captions help in noisy rooms; clear contrast helps in bright sun; good structure helps search engines.
What it looks like in practice
- Enough colour contrast between text and background
- Everything usable by keyboard, with a visible focus state
- Real alt text on meaningful images
- Proper headings and labels so screen readers make sense of the page
- Never relying on colour alone to carry meaning
Accessibility isn’t a bolt-on at the end. It’s a way of working that overlaps almost entirely with good UX and UI. Build it in from the first sketch and it costs almost nothing; retrofit it later and it costs a lot.