Accessibility means making sure people can use your website regardless of disability — whether they're using a screen reader, navigating with a keyboard only, zoomed to 200%, or simply struggling with low-contrast text on a bright phone screen outdoors. It's the right thing to do, it widens your customer base, and increasingly it's a requirement in the markets you may want to sell into.
What WCAG actually is
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for web accessibility, developed by the W3C. The current version, WCAG 2.2, was published in October 2023. It has 13 guidelines organised under four principles — content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust — with testable success criteria at three levels: A, AA and AAA (W3C: WCAG 2 Overview).
Level AA is the practical target most organisations aim for. WCAG 2.2 is also an approved ISO standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2025), and the W3C notes that most organisations addressing the European Accessibility Act use WCAG together with the European standard EN 301 549.
Why it matters commercially
- More customers can buy from you. A checkout that can't be completed with a keyboard or screen reader is a checkout some customers physically cannot use.
- International markets expect it. Laws and procurement policies in many countries reference WCAG — the W3C maintains a list of web accessibility laws and policies by country.
- It overlaps heavily with good UX and SEO. Descriptive alt text, clear headings and readable contrast help every visitor and help search engines understand your pages.
The fixes that cover the most ground
- Colour contrast. Body text needs enough contrast against its background (WCAG AA sets a 4.5:1 ratio for normal text). Light grey on white is the most common failure we see.
- Alt text on meaningful images. Product photos and informative images need a short description; purely decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
- Keyboard navigation. Tab through your site. Can you reach every menu, button and form field — and can you always see where focus is?
- Form labels. Every input needs a real label, not just placeholder text that disappears when you start typing. Error messages should say what went wrong and how to fix it.
- Heading structure. One H1 per page, then H2s and H3s in order — screen reader users navigate by headings.
- Link text that makes sense alone. "Read our returns policy" beats "click here".
- Captions and transcripts for video content, especially product and explainer videos.
- Don't disable zoom. Mobile viewport settings that block pinch-to-zoom lock out users who need to enlarge text.
Accessibility isn't a feature you bolt on at the end. It's the difference between a site some customers can use and a site all of them can.
How to check your own site
Start with the free, manual checks: navigate your homepage and checkout using only the Tab and Enter keys, and zoom your browser to 200% to see if anything breaks. Automated tools — including the accessibility audit built into Chrome's Lighthouse — catch many issues quickly, but not all; some criteria can only be judged by a person. The W3C's How to Meet WCAG 2.2 quick reference lets you filter the success criteria down to exactly what applies.
A realistic approach
You don't need to fix everything at once. Prioritise the paths that matter most commercially — navigation, product pages, contact forms and checkout — then work outward. For new builds, it's far cheaper to design accessibly from the start than to retrofit later.