Accessibility means people with disabilities can use your site: keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, sufficient contrast, and clear focus states. It overlaps heavily with good UX and SEO structure.
Quick wins
- Meaningful alt text for informative images.
- Logical heading hierarchy (one h1 per page).
- Visible focus styles and skip links where appropriate.
- Form labels tied to inputs, not placeholder-only hints.
Why this is not only a compliance checkbox
Roughly one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability; globally the share is substantial as well. If navigation, contrast, or forms exclude those visitors, you are turning away revenue that competitors may capture with modest fixes. Accessible markup—semantic headings, descriptive buttons, labeled inputs—also helps search engines understand pages.
Media and motion
Provide captions or transcripts for video with speech; offer pause controls for carousels; avoid autoplay audio that hijacks screen readers. Decorative images should use empty alt attributes so assistive tech skips them intentionally.
Testing beyond automated scans
Tools such as axe or Lighthouse find obvious failures but miss context: whether alt text is meaningful, whether error messages make sense when read aloud, or whether focus order follows visual logic. Schedule quarterly keyboard passes after major launches.