Accessibility (a11y)
Accessibility (often abbreviated a11y) is the practice of designing and building products that people with disabilities can perceive, operate, and understand.
Accessible products support keyboard use, screen readers, sufficient colour contrast, and clear structure. It is both an ethical baseline and a practical one: the same semantic structure and clarity that make a product accessible also make it more usable for everyone and more legible to machines.
How it works
The reference standard is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, organised around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. In practice that means text alternatives for images, enough colour contrast, every function usable by keyboard, visible focus, forms with real labels and clear errors, captions for video, and markup that assistive technology can interpret.
Much of it is decided before any code is written, in the design: contrast, type size, target size, and not relying on colour alone to carry meaning.
Example
A booking form whose fields show their names only as placeholder text fails twice: the label vanishes as soon as someone starts typing, and a screen reader may not announce it at all. A visible <label> tied to each field, with errors that say what to fix, works for everyone.
Common mistakes
- Treating accessibility as an audit at the end instead of a design and build requirement.
- Relying on automated checkers, which catch only a portion of real problems.
- Building custom buttons and menus from generic elements that keyboards and screen readers cannot use.
