Web Accessibility Compliance Guide: Making Your Site Inclusive

Why Web Accessibility Matters More Than Ever

In today's digital-first world, web accessibility isn't just a nice-to-have feature—it's an essential component of inclusive design that affects over 1 billion people worldwide who live with disabilities. Beyond the moral imperative, accessibility compliance has become a legal requirement in many countries, with significant financial penalties for non-compliance.

When I first started implementing accessibility standards on client projects back in 2018, I quickly realized that most developers approach accessibility as an afterthought. But the truth is, building accessible websites from the ground up saves time, reduces legal risks, and expands your potential audience significantly.

Core WCAG Principles and Implementation

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) form the international standard for web accessibility. The current version, WCAG 2.1, is built around four fundamental principles often called POUR:

Perceivable

Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This means providing text alternatives for non-text content, creating content that can be presented in different ways without losing information, and making it easier for users to see and hear content.

From my experience, one of the most common oversights is missing alt text for decorative images. While screen readers skip images with empty alt attributes (alt=""), it's better to explicitly mark them as decorative using aria-hidden="true" or using empty alt text for images that don't convey content.

<!-- Informative image -->
<img src="chart.png" alt="Quarterly sales chart showing 15% growth">

<!-- Decorative image -->
<img src="divider.png" alt="">

<!-- Complex image -->
<img src="org-chart.png" alt="Company organizational structure">
<a href="/org-chart-description">Detailed description of organizational chart</a>

Operable

User interface components and navigation must be operable. This includes making all functionality available from a keyboard, giving users enough time to read and use content, not designing content in a way that is known to cause seizures, and helping users navigate and find content.

I've found that many developers underestimate the importance of keyboard navigation. During a recent audit for an e-commerce client, we discovered that their mega-menu was completely inaccessible to keyboard users, potentially excluding up to 15% of their traffic from completing purchases.

Understandable

Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. This means making text readable and understandable, making content appear and operate in predictable ways, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes.

Robust

Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This primarily involves using valid HTML and ensuring proper labeling of elements.

Advanced ARIA Implementation

While semantic HTML should be your first approach, sometimes you need ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to fill the gaps for complex widgets. However, ARIA should be used sparingly—the first rule of ARIA is to not use ARIA if a native HTML element exists.

One of the trickiest aspects I've encountered is managing live regions for dynamic content. For single-page applications where content updates without page reloads, you need to carefully consider how to notify assistive technology users of these changes.

Common Accessibility Issues and Solutions

Based on my experience conducting dozens of accessibility audits, these are the most frequent issues I encounter and how to fix them:

<!-- Standard approach -->
<label for="email">Email Address</label>
<input type="email" id="email" name="email">

<!-- Visually hidden label -->
<label for="search" class="sr-only">Search this site</label>
<input type="search" id="search" name="search">

<!-- CSS for visually hidden class -->
.sr-only {
  position: absolute;
  width: 1px;
  height: 1px;
  padding: 0;
  margin: -1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  clip: rect(0, 0, 0, 0);
  white-space: nowrap;
  border: 0;
}