accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of building a site so it works for people using it differently than a designer might assume. That includes someone who is blind and navigating by screen reader, someone with a motor condition who cannot use a mouse and tabs through a page by keyboard, someone with low vision who needs strong contrast between text and background, and plenty of people with no disability at all who are just reading a phone screen in direct sunlight or with a cracked pair of glasses.

The technical standard behind most of this is called WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It covers things like whether every image has a text description, whether every interactive element can be reached and used with a keyboard alone, whether colour contrast is strong enough to read, and whether the page’s headings are structured in an order that actually makes sense.

Why it matters to you

A site that fails on accessibility turns away real customers before they ever see what you sell. Someone using a screen reader who hits a page with no text descriptions on the images, or a form with no labels a screen reader can announce, does not struggle through it. They leave, and they usually do not come back to try again.

There is also a newer reason this matters that has nothing to do with disability directly. AI tools browsing the web on someone’s behalf, an assistant looking up your hours or checking whether you offer a service, read a page more like a screen reader does than like a human eye does. A page built with clear structure and proper labelling is easier for those tools to read correctly, which shows up as agentic browsing scores improving alongside accessibility ones. On one recent audit, the accessibility score reached a perfect 100 on both mobile and desktop, and the agentic browsing check went from passing half its criteria to passing all of them at the same time.

How I set it up

I build every site with accessibility in mind from the first page, not as a pass I run at the end. That means proper heading structure, text descriptions on every meaningful image, colour combinations that meet contrast standards, and every interactive element reachable and usable without a mouse. Because the sites I build are hand-written pages rather than a page builder’s generated output, there is no bloated markup working against the standard before I even start.

I check the result with automated scoring, the same kind of tool that produces the 100 score mentioned above, and I check it manually by tabbing through a page myself and confirming the structure reads sensibly out of order, the way a screen reader would encounter it.

What it looks like in practice

You will not see accessibility work directly; you will see its absence, or its presence, in how the site behaves. Tab through a page with the mouse put away and every button and link should be reachable in a sensible order. Turn on a screen reader and headings should announce the page’s structure clearly. Run the page through an accessibility scanner and it should come back clean, the way a well-built site always does when nobody cut corners to get it live faster.