When we talk about accessible websites and digital products, what usually comes to mind?
Often, it’s a government website with a giant A and a plus and minus sign, so people can zoom the text in and out. Sometimes it’s a site with oversized text, or a text-to-speech tool that pipes up at the most inconvenient moment. And sometimes it’s a widget bolted onto a site that was never built to be accessible in the first place, sold by a team with a great pitch and a product that’s a band-aid at best.
Then there’s the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Read the guidelines without a technical background, and they seem close to impossible to decipher. Success criteria, conformance levels, terms you’ve never heard of and a whole lot of googling just to understand what’s required. No wonder so many people avoid the topic altogether.
In each of these scenarios, the intention is good but the execution lacking. All that said, designing an accessible website or product isn’t as complicated as you think.
Good design isn’t segmented
Best practice is best practice for a reason. Most of the heuristics that make a design good already point you toward an accessible outcome: clear contrast, obvious focus states, sensible heading structure, forms that make sense. Good design isn’t segmented into “the accessible version” and “the normal version.” It works in tandem.
- Take on the requirements of users with visual impairments or a physical disability, and you’ll end up with a better experience for everyone else too.
- Captions help someone who’s deaf, but they also help someone watching a video on the train with the sound off.
- Larger touch targets help someone with limited dexterity, but they also help someone trying to tap a button while holding a coffee.
Solve for the edge, and you improve the centre.
Accessibility isn’t just for “disabled people”
When we think about accessible experiences, we tend to picture permanent disability. That’s part of the audience sure, but not the full story.
Accessibility needs show up in 3 ways: situational, temporary, and permanent. Once you start digging, you’ll find people with accessibility needs everywhere:
- A new parent filling in a form one-handed while holding a baby (situational)
- Someone typing with a broken wrist in a cast (temporary)
- Someone with low vision or limited mobility (permanent)
- An older person who’s spent most of their life catching up with new technology
- Someone who’s just stepped outside into bright sunlight and can’t read their screen
- Someone who’s left their glasses at home, again
- Someone who’s colour-blind and can’t tell your error message from your success message
- Someone on a patchy connection, waiting for a heavy page to load on the train
- Someone who’s stressed, rushed, or just having a bad day, with no patience left and a digital task making it worse.
If you’ve ever washed over accessibility as a ‘nice to have’, you might want to rethink.
Globally, an estimated 2.2 billion people live with some kind of vision impairment, according to the World Health Organization. That’s more than a quarter of the planet, before you even count temporary and situational needs.
In short, we’ll all need an accessible platform at some point in our lives. And yet, as the people responsible for building these tools, we fail our users constantly.
Digital by default is the new default
As governments make digital their primary way of communicating, cash and paper disappear, and talking to human gets harder, the people who relied on non-digital systems have fewer places left to go. When was the last time you tried to do any kind of life admin without your mobile to hand? It’s virtually impossible to exist in the modern world without a device as an extension of ourselves.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting everyone over 60 is incompetent with a computer. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to ‘move with the times’. I’m saying we’re delivering experiences that don’t support everyone the way they should.
Ageing is coming for all of us
If you know me, you’ll know I have a bone to pick about the digital experiences we hand to older people. If we’re lucky, we’re all going to get old. And when we do, we’ll face new challenges: our motor skills will slow, our memory will lapse, our concentration will fracture, and our patience will wear thin. We’ll feel less confident, and we’ll get stressed more easily.
I wrote about this in more detail in Creating websites for older people, where I looked at what changes for users once they’re past retirement age. In this piece, I want to go a step further and talk about designing accessible digital products more broadly, and why we absolutely should. If someone can’t use the things we create, that’s not their fault. It’s ours.
Effortless by default, should be the new default
Accessible design isn’t a separate discipline you bolt on at the end of a project. It’s not a compliance checklist, and it’s definitely not a widget. It’s what good design looks like when you actually account for the people using it. All of them, not just the ones who look like your persona’s.
If your interface only works for someone with perfect vision, a steady hand, full concentration, and a fast connection, on a good day, it’s likley broken for everyone else. And “everyone else” is a much bigger group than most teams assume.
It starts with the brand, and trickles into every touchpoint your users have with your organisation. We need Accessible Digital Design & Design Systems: building the accessible version as the only version, at the same time.
What it costs to get it wrong
In 2000, a blind man named Bruce Maguire complained that the Sydney Olympics website was inaccessible to his screen reader. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission agreed, ruling that a website counts as a “service” under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and ordered the organisers to pay damages. That case set the precedent still used today: in Australia, an inaccessible website isn’t just bad practice, it can be unlawful discrimination.
For government work, this isn’t optional. WCAG 2.1 AA is mandated under the Digital Service Standard. For everyone else, WCAG remains the practical yardstick, it’s what courts and complaint bodies fall back on when a dispute lands on their desk.
The market you’re missing
More than 1 in 5 Australians, 5.5 million people, reported having a disability in the ABS’s 2022 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, and that number is rising. For people aged 65 and over, it’s more than half. And we’re an ageing population.
That’s not a niche. That’s a market you can’t afford to forget.
The quick wins for converison
The fixes that help someone with low vision or limited mobility are usually the same fixes that improve conversion for everyone.
Bigger touch targets reduce mis-taps for every user, not just someone with reduced dexterity. Clearer contrast and plainer copy reduce cognitive load for someone half-focused on their phone at exactly the same rate they help someone with a cognitive impairment. Fewer, clearer form fields lower abandonment across the board. You don’t need to choose between “accessible” and “high-converting.” They’re usually the same brief.
The 5-minute self-audit
You don’t need a WCAG certification to start finding problems. Try this, right now, on your own site:
- Run it through a free contrast checker (like WebAIM) and see what fails, especially error states and body text on your brand colours.
- Zoom your browser to 200% and see what breaks.
- Unplug your mouse and try to tab through the page and submit a form using only your keyboard.
- Turn on your phone’s screen reader (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and listen to how your homepage sounds.
- Skim your images. If you removed them all, would the alt text still tell the story?
Questions to ask your developer or agency
If you’re not the one building the site, you can still hold the work to account. Ask:
- Are focus states visible when you tab through the page, or does the cursor just disappear?
- Is the site built with semantic HTML, proper headings, labelled form fields, or is everything a generic div?
- Does every image have meaningful alt text, or none at all?
- Can someone complete your key task, buy, book, apply, or enquire, without touching a mouse?
If the answer to any of these is “we haven’t checked,” it’s likely worth allocating some budget here.
Testing doesn’t need a lab
The best way to know if something works is to watch someone use it. You don’t need a research lab or a six-figure study. A handful of short sessions with people who actually have access needs, a screen reader user, someone with a motor impairment, someone older and less confident online, will tell you more in an afternoon than any audit tool.
None of this requires a developer, a big budget, or a plugin promising to fix everything overnight. It just requires paying attention to who’s actually using what you build.
The Wrap
Accessible design isn’t a specialist skill bolted on at the end. It’s what good design already looks like when it accounts for the widest range of people using it, not just the easiest ones to design for.
In Australia, getting it wrong carries real legal risk under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and a market you can’t afford to price out: more than 1 in 5 Australians live with a disability. Start this week: run a free contrast check, tab through your forms with no mouse, and ask your dev team what’s actually been tested.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_Sydney_Organising_Committee_for_the_Olympic_Games_(2000)
https://www.dta.gov.au/node/847
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/55-million-australians-have-disability
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment
