Accessibility is hard, because it makes you do things the right way

Like proper data privacy controls, accessibility is another unpopular topic, that seemingly doesn’t deliver much value to the owner or administrator of a website. At the same time, a not unsignificant amount of time is required to properly understand all the parts that need to come together to fulfill the requirements to your site.

I’ve found myself to be one of the few people that actually enjoy working on increasing the accessibility of a website. Part of this is surely attributed to the fact that understanding it, requires a deep understanding of how websites are build and delivered, and to pick and choose between the many semantic meanings the simple building blocks of HTML can be assigned.

For everyone else out there, I tried to summarize why a11y (common shorthand, replacing the center eleven letters with 11) can be harder to get right than you might think, but also why it matters.

Accessibility equals Usability

At the core, every measure to make a site more accessible, increases the usability for a wider audience to which your website might not have been relevant before. In that way we often think of making a site usable to someone who was not able to use it at all before.

However, it’s more than just black and white: As soon as your website is on the internet, technically anyone can access it. But not everyone might understand how to or be able to use it effectively.

By giving additional context, how your site exects to be used, you’re opening it up to the many different ways people already are interacting with websites: Pro dekstop users are used to their shortcuts to quickly jump through the relevant parts of a website, avid readers will open your site in special reader views potentially missing entire sections of unoptimized content and others will have your content read out to them.

The most important goal is to make the internet (declared a human right) more accessible to people with disabilities, the fact that it does make it more usable for everyone is a nice side effect though.

Accessibility equals Compatibility

By investing in a11y you are essentially improving the compatibility of your site with other technologies, helping them understand and deliver the most value to the people using them.

Different input methods beyond just mouse and keyboard are trying their best to guess how a website can be interacted with. To this day mobile touch screens emulate a “mouse hover” when softly or briefly touching an element, because it was easier to do that instead of introducing an entirely new ruleset for interactions.

This does include helping assistive technologies like screen-readers understand how the individual islands of text on your website relate to each other, but also which parts of a site can be interacted with, so that assistive input devices can translate gestures or keystrokes to something your site already understands.

So add to the huge range of ways to navigate the web the early adopters who will put up your site in their Vision Pro's virtual workspace, the fleet of travellers looking for a car wash, restaurants or parking right from the screen of their car, or the smart households equipped with smart fridges (youtube), voice assistants and personal AI gadgets.

Accessibility equals Findability

A well defined and easy to follow structure is essential to allow visitors on your site to navigate through it, skip the parts they don’t care about and find the specific information they are looking for.

Google has long been the major player in Search Engine Optimization that everyone strived to optimize their websites for, they even had to explicitly tell SEO experts to not optimize for Google itself, but to create people-first content.

So while the content itself should absolutely be written for people, the way that it is delivered to the tech used to consume it, has to be machine-readable as well. That includes making browsers and assistive technologies understand it, let search indexers like Google know what’s most import, and — looking towards the future — will increasingly mean giving AI agents more context on how to understand your content.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but it all boils down to the same principles of an accessible website: Images containing text are bad, neither assistive technologies nor search indexers are able to (easily) understand it, content needs to have structure not only visually but also through markup so that headlines can be skipped through or taken as more important by search and AI tools.

Accessibility is hard?

To create accessible websites you need to have a lot of context on how the web works, understand all the ways a user can interact with a website, how the many assistive technologies work, about when to apply which a11y hints and features and probably a lot more.

In a perfect world, every website would be perfectly accessible already, for all the benefits and positive side-effects this brings to the organization running the site.

However, reliably and consistently getting a11y right, requires a varied skillset around the web, a mature development process to catch a11y errors early and dedicated, manual accessibility testing on a range of devices and documentation on how to create accessible content.

Common shortcuts to reduce the required budget, expertise or reliability fall flat, as they are often not accessible out of the box, or don’t allow you to change the markup as needed. As a matter of fact, ignoring accessibility until your new site is ready to launch and finding out the foundations need to be rebuilt, would be the least efficient way.

All in all, if you want to get accessibility right, you are forced to do things the right way, from the start.