What Is Digital Accessibility? A Global Overview
Accessibility is typically viewed as a compliance checklist/task. Follow the rules, check off the appropriate boxes and then move on. However, this viewpoint leaves out the real intent behind digital accessibility.
The main goal behind digital accessibility is to ensure that individuals can actually utilise your product, not just if your site meets some arbitrary checklist, but rather if a real individual, with real needs, can achieve their objectives on your product/site.
The differences between these two viewpoints are more critical to many businesses than they realise.
What Digital Accessibility Entails
Digital accessibility ensures that online content (websites, applications, documents, interactive tools) works for the entire spectrum of individuals who may need it. This includes both individuals with physical disabilities, such as visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments, as well as individuals with situational/temporary limitations, such as a parent scrolling while holding a child, a commuter with a slow internet connection, or a person in a loud area who cannot listen to audio.
By designing your product for accessibility, you aren’t just creating a separate experience for somebody with a disability; you are creating a better experience for everyone.
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the globally recognised standard for measuring online accessibility. Published by W3C, WCAG establishes four guiding principles for evaluating accessibility known as POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. In addition, the majority of legal standards used to evaluate accessibility utilise WCAG 2.1 level AA as the acceptable standard.
Brief History
The W3C established its first set of accessibility standards in 1999. As the web became increasingly complex, the standards became more detailed.
WCAG 2.0 was established in 2008 and is based on the POUR framework.
WCAG 2.1 was established in 2018 and provided additional standards for evaluating accessibility for mobile devices, cognitive impairments and low vision.
WCAG 2.2 was established in 2023 to provide additional detail to WCAG 2.1.
Both 2.1 and 2.2 have been adopted and/or referenced by law in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and other countries.
Practical Application of WCAG
In practice, WCAG compliance entails ensuring that items such as:
Images contain alt-text descriptions,
Form fields have associated labels,
A user can navigate the website using a keyboard,
Colour combinations comply with specified ratio standards for colour contrast and,
Error messages clearly communicate why something went wrong.
Admittedly, these are just basic usability standards, but when they are absent, users with disabilities encounter barriers that other users do not.
Legal Standards
United Kingdom
The Equality Act 2010 requires organisations to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. WCAG 2.1 AA is the required standard for compliance. In addition, public sector entities have additional compliance obligations with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) 2018, which mandate compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA.
European Union
The Web Accessibility Directive mandated public sector bodies to provide accessible websites beginning in 2016. On 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act expanded the scope to include private companies operating in various sectors, including e-commerce, financial services and travel. All companies that sell products to consumers within the European Union should consider the implications of this new directive.
United States
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act mandates compliance with WCAG 2.0 AA for federal government agencies. Courts in the United States have consistently determined that private websites constitute "places of public accommodation" under the Americans with Disabilities Act. More than 4,000 ADA-related lawsuits were filed in U.S. federal courts in 2023 alone!
Why Accessibility Is a Financial Benefit
While avoiding litigation is a significant benefit, there are numerous other reasons to make your website accessible.
You’re ignoring 20% of your market
According to the Click-Away Pound study, the estimated annual loss to businesses in the United Kingdom due to disabled users abandoning websites they could not access is £11.75 billion.
Better SEO means lower marketing costs
Google’s algorithm and LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all rely on clear headers, alt text, and a logical structure to make sense of your pages. When your site is accessible, it’s much easier for these tools to crawl your content and recommend your business to users. Being accessible helps you show up without leaning so heavily on paid ads.
Plug the leaks in your sales funnel
Most businesses lose customers because they are just frustrated. If your checkout forms are clunky or your navigation is confusing, people drop off. Making your site accessible removes those ‘red flags’ for your customers, leading to fewer abandoned carts and a much higher conversion rate.
Future-proof your investment
Fixing accessibility as an afterthought is expensive and messy. Building it into your process now avoids the high costs of emergency retrofitting when a new law kicks in, an audit fails, or you receive a legal threat in the mail. In a nutshell, it’s much cheaper to build it right the first time than to pay a developer to unpick mistakes later on.
The ‘Curb Cut Effect’
On pavements/side-walks, you’ll have seen ‘curb cuts’, those little ramps. They were built for wheelchair users, but they’re used every day by people with strollers, delivery drivers, and travellers with wheeled suitcases. Digital accessibility works the same way. Captions on your video content might be essential for someone who is Deaf, but they’re also used by someone on a loud train, or a parent trying not to wake a sleeping baby. When you build for the edge cases, you end up making a better product for everyone.
Getting Started
Most people start with an automated scan. Automated scanning tools such as WAVE, Axe, Google Insights, and our very own scanner here at Accessima quickly allow developers to identify structural errors. However, automated scanning only identifies between 30% of real accessibility errors. The remaining 70% of real accessibility errors are best discovered through manual testing. Examples of real accessibility errors that automated scanning tools cannot discover include: keyboard traps, logically incorrect heading orders, screen-reader conflicts, and contextual alt-text.
An independent accessibility audit will give you an overall picture of your website’s level of accessibility. The results will include details about every accessibility error, their level of severity, and provide you with specific guidance as to how you can address each issue.
If you'd like us to review your site and explain everything in plain English, book a free consultation! We'd be more than happy to guide you through our basic evaluation process.
