3 Things Every Developer Should Know About Web Accessibility

Our Team Lead Lauris Blīgzna recently shared a profound question that resonated deeply: “How do disabled people use the web?” As a web developer, it’s easy to get caught up in the technicalities of building applications without fully considering the diverse needs of all potential users. This single question sparked a critical reflection: “Am I truly creating software that is accessible and available for everyone?” This article aims to distill the complex world of web accessibility into three essential insights every developer needs to know to build a more inclusive digital future.

Insight 1: Understanding the ‘Why’ – The Human, Business, and Legal Imperatives of Digital Inclusion

Web accessibility is fundamentally about making your digital content, applications, and tools usable by everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. This means ensuring that people with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological impairments can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web. Beyond benefiting individuals with permanent disabilities, accessibility also significantly improves the experience for others, such as older adults experiencing age-related changes, people with temporary disabilities (e.g., a broken arm), or those facing situational limitations (e.g., using a mobile device in bright sunlight or with a slow internet connection).

The Human Impact: Millions worldwide live with disabilities that affect their interaction with digital platforms. By removing accessibility barriers, we enable greater participation, social inclusion, and independence for a significant portion of the global population. The web’s inherent power lies in its universality – it was designed to be for everyone, irrespective of hardware, software, language, or ability.

The Business Case: Beyond the ethical imperative, there’s a compelling business case for accessibility. Accessible websites and applications can:

• Expand market reach: Tapping into the purchasing power of people with disabilities and their families.
• Enhance brand reputation: Demonstrating social responsibility and commitment to inclusivity.
• Improve SEO: Many accessibility best practices, like semantic HTML and proper alt text, align with search engine optimization.
• Reduce legal risk: Non-compliance with accessibility laws can lead to significant penalties and lawsuits.
• Boost user experience for all: Features designed for accessibility often benefit the entire user base.

The Legal Imperative: The European Accessibility Act (EAA): Developers operating within or serving the European Union must be aware of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which came into force on June 28, 2025. This directive mandates that a wide range of products and services, including e-commerce platforms, banking services, e-books, and mobile applications, must meet specific accessibility requirements. Failure to comply can result in substantial monetary fines and other penalties, making early preparation and adherence crucial for businesses. The EAA complements existing regulations like the EU’s Web Accessibility Directive for the public sector and reinforces the obligations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Insight 2: Navigating the ‘How’ – Adhering to Modern Accessibility Standards (WCAG 2.x)

The global benchmark for web accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for making web content more accessible. While WCAG 2.0 was the standard for many years, modern development should target WCAG 2.1 and ideally WCAG 2.2.

WCAG 2.1 and 2.2: The Evolving Standards:

• WCAG 2.1, published in 2018, extended WCAG 2.0 to improve accessibility for mobile users, people with low vision, and those with cognitive disabilities.
• WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, further builds upon 2.1 by adding nine new success criteria, primarily focusing on cognitive accessibility, mobile usability, and keyboard navigation, while removing one outdated criterion (4.1.1 Parsing). Importantly, WCAG 2.2 is backward compatible, meaning that conformance with 2.2 implies conformance with 2.1 and 2.0.

The POUR Principles: All versions of WCAG are structured around four fundamental principles, often remembered by the acronym POUR:

• Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for non-text content, captions for audio, and ensuring sufficient contrast.
• Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable. This includes making all functionality available via keyboard, providing enough time for users to interact, and avoiding content that causes seizures.
• Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This involves making text readable and predictable, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes.
• Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This means using valid HTML and ensuring compatibility with current and future tools.

Achieving WCAG 2.1 Level AA or WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance is generally considered the industry standard for digital accessibility and is often referenced in legal requirements, including the European Accessibility Act.

Insight 3: Implementing ‘What’ – Key Principles for Accessible Design and Development

Translating the ‘why’ and ‘how’ into practical implementation requires a commitment to accessible design and development practices from the outset. Here are key principles to guide your work:

1. Semantic HTML: Use HTML elements for their intended purpose (e.g., <button> for buttons, <h1-h6> for headings, <nav> for navigation). This provides crucial structure for assistive technologies like screen readers.

2. Keyboard Navigability: Ensure all interactive elements and content can be accessed and operated using only a keyboard. This is vital for users who cannot use a mouse.

3. Alternative Text for Images: Provide concise and descriptive alt text for all meaningful images. This allows screen readers to convey visual information to users who are blind or have low vision.

4. Sufficient Color Contrast: Ensure there is adequate contrast between text and background colors to make content readable for people with low vision or color blindness. WCAG 2.x specifies minimum contrast ratios.

5. Clear and Consistent Language: Use plain language, clear headings, and consistent navigation patterns to make content understandable for everyone, including those with cognitive disabilities.

6. Form Accessibility: Label all form fields correctly using <label> elements, provide clear instructions, and offer helpful error messages that are programmatically associated with the fields.

7. Captions and Transcripts for Media: Provide captions for all audio and video content, and transcripts for audio-only content. This benefits users who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those in noisy environments.

8. Focus Management: Ensure that the visual focus indicator (e.g., an outline around a button) is always visible and moves logically through interactive elements as a user tabs through the page. WCAG 2.2 has new criteria specifically for focus appearance.

9. Responsive Design: While not strictly an accessibility criterion, a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and orientations often improves usability for diverse users and devices.

10. Regular Testing: Integrate accessibility testing into your development lifecycle. This includes automated tools, manual keyboard testing, and, most importantly, testing with actual users with disabilities and assistive technologies.

A key principle of Web accessibility is designing Web sites and software that are flexible to meet different user odds and needs. This flexibility also benefits people without disabilities in certain situations, such as people using the slow Internet connection, people with injuries such as a broken arm, and people with changing abilities due to aging.

The power of the Web is in its universality

The Web is basically designed for everyone, regardless of what hardware or software you have, which language you speak, which culture you belong to, where you live or what your physical or mental ability is.

The web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, etc. It is essential that the Web can be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity for disabled people.

The impact of disability is radically changed on the Web because the Web removes communication barriers and difficulties in interaction that many people face in the physical world. However, when websites, web technologies, or web tools are badly designed, they can create barriers that exclude people from using the Web.

Also, people are aging and it results in a number of accessibility issues, including vision and hearing changes, and declines in dexterity and memory.

Users

The web is used by millions of people and 20-30% of them are with different disabilities and needs.

Visually impaired users range from the colour blindness to full blindness. Without a text description, it is difficult for a blind user to understand what it is represented on the website. For colourblind users, it is also difficult to perceive design elements (including text) whose colours aren’t sufficiently different from the elements around them (e.g. background colours)

Hearing-impaired users are facing similar issues as visually impaired users. Hearing-impaired users may have difficulties in understanding what a video or audio record on the website says. A simple solution is to provide an alternative, such as a text description or an image.

Physical Disabilities: If you aren’t physically disabled, it might be hard to imagine how your online experience would look like if you were disabled. Now, try to use one of the websites you use every day without a mouse. How is it? I’ve tried it myself and it is hard. When you create Website navigation and inputs, physically disabled users may find your site completely impossible to navigate.

But that’s not all. Accessible Web can give advantages for other users, for example, users that access a website from a noisy environment (e.g., from a crowded cafe, etc.), with “screen glare”, with low literacy level etc.

How can you make your WEB more Accessible?

You may think that this is really hard, but the fact is that there are some simple steps that can greatly increase your website utility. There is also a hidden benefit of doing it: some of the techniques increase your SEO ratings.

Let me share these techniques with you:

1) Add a proper alt text to images

2) Use headings properly

3) Add labels to form fields

4) Group related form fields together

5) Markup tables appropriately

Include markup that clearly communicates the relationship between the table headers and the cells within their scope.

6) Identify the text language.

Identify the default language of a document:

7) Use a color contrast checker

8) Avoid using tiny fonts

9) Respect white space

Space between lines and space between paragraphs can help users who have difficulty tracking text horizontally. Contributes to a cleaner, more aesthetically pleasing interface for everyone.

10) Provide visible indication of focus – it is especially important for keyboard users.

11) Skip navigation

allows screen reader users and people who can’t use a mouse to skip long lists of links, such as the primary navigation on a website.

12) Turn of JavaScript and test your page.

Conclusion

As a developer, you should be aware that there are many users with different needs and abilities. It’s always good to be able to develop high-quality software. But it is especially valuable when you know how to develop software that can be used by everyone, regardless of what their needs and abilities are. It doesn’t take a long time to learn how to do it, but this knowledge will always be useful.

Start with the little things and in the end, it will become something big and meaningful.