Web Accessibility Basics: A Beginner's Guide to WCAG

Web accessibility means building sites that everyone can use — including people with visual, motor, auditory, or cognitive disabilities. It’s the right thing to do, it’s increasingly a legal requirement, and it makes your site better for all users. Here are the basics every site owner should know.

What is web accessibility?

Accessibility (often abbreviated “a11y”) ensures people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnifiers, or other assistive technologies can perceive and operate your website. Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with some form of disability, per the World Health Organization — that’s a huge audience to exclude.

Meet WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C, are the global standard. They’re organised around four principles, summarised by the acronym POUR:

• Perceivable — content can be seen or heard
• Operable — interface works with keyboard and assistive tech
• Understandable — content and operation are clear
• Robust — works across browsers and devices

Most organisations aim for WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

Common, high-impact fixes

You don’t need to do everything at once. Start with these:

Colour contrast

Ensure text has sufficient contrast against its background — 4.5:1 for normal text. Check yours with the WebAIM Contrast Checker. This also ties into your colour scheme choices.

Alt text for images

Every meaningful image needs descriptive alternative text so screen-reader users understand it. Decorative images get empty alt attributes.

Keyboard navigation

Everything clickable must be reachable and usable with a keyboard alone, with visible focus states. Many users can’t use a mouse.

Semantic HTML

Use proper headings, lists, buttons, and landmarks. Semantic markup is the foundation screen readers rely on — MDN’s accessibility docs explain this well.

Form labels

Every input needs an associated label. Unlabelled forms are a major barrier.

Test your site

Automated tools catch many issues quickly. Try WAVE or the axe DevTools extension. But automated tools only catch part of the picture — manual keyboard and screen-reader testing is essential.

Accessibility helps everyone

Captions help people in noisy environments. Good contrast helps in bright sunlight. Clear structure helps everyone scan. Accessibility overlaps heavily with good UX and even SEO, since semantic, well-structured sites are easier for search engines to understand.

Make it part of your process

Accessibility is far cheaper to build in from the start than to retrofit. Bake it into your design and development workflow. Our web development service treats accessibility as a baseline, not an afterthought — because a site everyone can use is simply a better site.

Further reading

• ARIA Authoring Practices Guide
• A11Y Project checklist