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Home Blog What Is Web Accessibility? Key Principles, Guidelines, and Best Practices
A 2024 study carried out by Accessibility Checker, analyzed over 63,000 websites and discovered that 88% of them were still not fully compliant with the latest web accessibility standards.
May 19, 2025
This stat is staggering in itself but even more so when you consider that according to the World Health Organization roughly 16% of the world’s population are living with some form of disability.
Web accessibility needs to improve, and businesses need to start taking action.
It’s more than a box to check. It covers customer experience, legal compliance, brand reputation, and social responsibility. Making your website accessible fosters trust, drives loyalty, and reduces the risk of legal exposure.
Let’s take the 340 million people globally who are blind or have low vision as an example…
Without accessible design and development, much of the web remains closed to them.
But with the right tools and practices such as screen reader-friendly layouts, alt text, and proper keyboard navigation, we can build experiences that are truly accessible for all.
Whether you’re a business leader focused on growth, a compliance manager, a developer or a web designer, web accessibility affects your work. In this article, we cover what web accessibility means, why it matters, key principles (like POUR), guidelines (like WCAG), and actionable best practices for creating websites that welcome everyone.
Web accessibility is the process of designing and developing digital experiences that can be used by everyone including people with disabilities. This includes individuals who are blind, have low vision, are deaf or hard of hearing, have motor impairments, cognitive differences, or other physical and neurological conditions.
Additionally, from the study we referenced earlier, just 4% of the 63,000+ sites analyzed were fully compliant with 8% being only partly compliant. Read the full study here.
Accessible websites ensure that all users can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with digital content, regardless of how they access the web. That may mean browsing with a screen reader, navigating via keyboard or voice commands, using captions to follow a video, or simply needing a distraction-free interface to stay focused.
Importantly, accessibility goes far beyond color contrast or text size. It’s about inclusive design; creating experiences that are flexible, adaptable, and mindful of diverse needs from the start. An accessible website considers:
Web accessibility isn’t just a technical requirement. Here’s why it matters on every level:
Governments around the world are enacting and enforcing digital accessibility regulations. Ignoring accessibility can expose companies to significant legal and financial risk:
Access to digital information is a fundamental human right. For over 1.3 billion people worldwide living with disabilities, the internet is an essential tool for communication, education, employment, shopping, and more. When digital spaces are inaccessible, they’re excluded from full participation in society.
Accessibility is also a smart business decision. A survey of U.K. consumers found 55% had abandoned a purchase due to accessibility issues, with those lost sales amounting to a potential £120 billion forfeited by retailers.
Being known as an inclusive, accessible brand, builds trust and credibility with customers, partners, and employees alike. Inaccessible experiences, on the other hand, damage your reputation and signal a lack of care.
Accessibility is an accelerator for innovation, growth, and inclusion. Businesses that embrace it build better, more human-centered digital experiences.
To turn accessibility principles into actionable standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These internationally recognized guidelines provide the technical foundation for building accessible websites and apps.
WCAG is a set of testable success criteria that help ensure digital content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR – explained in the next section). The current version, WCAG 2.1, is widely adopted, with WCAG 2.2 recently released and expanding coverage for users with cognitive and low-vision needs.
Each guideline is organized into three levels of conformance:
Businesses should ideally aim for Level AA compliance as a baseline for digital experiences.
Global Relevance WCAG is also embedded in accessibility legislation around the world:
Failing to meet these standards can lead to legal risk, but more importantly, it means excluding users who rely on accessible interfaces.
For a full breakdown of the guidelines, visit the official W3C WCAG Overview.
The foundation of digital accessibility is built on four guiding principles, outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These are known by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Together, they provide a framework for designing experiences that work for everyone.
Let’s break them down:
Information and user interface components must be presented in ways that users can perceive.
User interface components and navigation must be usable by all.
Information and the operation of the interface must be clear and predictable.
Content must be reliably interpreted by a wide range of user agents, including assistive technologies.
Understanding and applying the POUR framework can help your team make sure accessibility is factored into every part of the user experience.
Building accessible digital experiences is only part of the equation. Thorough testing is essential to ensure those experiences actually work for everyone. Accessibility testing helps identify barriers, validate fixes, and drive continuous improvement across your web ecosystem.
While automation is a great starting point, don’t rely on it alone.
Effective testing includes a combination of methods: automated tools, manual reviews, and real-world user feedback.
Automated tools are a fast and efficient way to catch common accessibility issues in code, such as missing alt text, poor color contrast, or improper heading structure.
Popular tools include:
Manual testing helps you evaluate how people with disabilities actually experience your website.
Key methods include:
The most meaningful insights come from real users navigating your site using their own tools and preferences. Partnering with users who are blind, have low vision, or have other disabilities can expose friction points that go unseen in automated or internal testing.
Combining all three gives you a well-rounded, accurate picture of accessibility across your digital touchpoints. And, don’t stop with just testing at launch, it should be an ongoing commitment. The most inclusive organizations for example will integrate accessibility testing into every design sprint, QA cycle, and product release.
Even well-intentioned teams can unintentionally create web accessibility barriers. However, many issues come from common mistakes that are easy to prevent once you know what to look for.
Here are some of the most frequent accessibility mistakes to avoid…
Images without alt text leave screen reader users in the dark, while decorative images with unnecessary alt text cause clutter.
Using placeholder text instead of proper elements causes major usability issues, especially for screen reader and keyboard users.
Users who navigate using only a keyboard are often unable to access or interact with key elements such as menus, pop-ups, and forms.
Test your entire site with a keyboard (Tab, Enter, Shift+Tab, Esc).
Ensure focus order is logical and visible at all times.
Modals or dropdowns trap keyboard focus, preventing users from navigating away or closing them.
Colorblind or low-vision users can’t distinguish between elements differentiated only by color (e.g., red = error, green = success).
Many CAPTCHA tools are visual-only or difficult to solve with assistive technology.
Audio or video that plays automatically can disorient users, especially those using screen readers or cognitive assistive tools.
Proactively avoiding these issues helps your site meet accessibility standards and significantly improves usability for everyone.
While web accessibility is critical for businesses to meet legal requirements and provide inclusive experiences, it’s only the beginning of making the digital world truly accessible. Going beyond traditional accessibility measures, Be My Eyes offers innovative solutions that connect people who are blind or have low-vision to real-time support. Through live video calls and AI-driven assistance, Be My Eyes enhances both the customer and employee experience, ensuring accessibility extends into every corner of your business.
When accessibility becomes a core part of your strategy, you foster stronger relationships and create a more equitable, inclusive world for everyone.
