Why Is Web Accessibility Important, and How Does It Affect Your Website?

Almost every website shuts some visitors out, and most of the teams behind them don’t know it. Web accessibility is the work of designing and building websites so that all information and functionality can be fully used by all people, including people with disabilities. It matters because it gives everyone equal access to information and services, improves usability for every visitor, supports SEO and reduces legal risk.

This guide covers what web accessibility is, why it matters, how common impairments affect the way people use the web, the basics of the WCAG standard and what the law expects today. We first published it in 2019, and we’ve kept that original context, clearly dated, alongside current guidance. If you’re looking for the design approach and the business case in more depth, see our companion post on accessible web design and inclusive design.

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility means people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with websites and digital tools, and contribute to them, using whatever technology they rely on. That includes people with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, learning and neurological disabilities.

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) classifies a disability as “a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities.”

You may be thinking: “The majority of my market are able-bodied; they don’t fall into the category of ‘people with disabilities.’ Do I still need to think about web accessibility?”

The answer is yes, absolutely.

Why is web accessibility important?

Accessibility isn’t a “nice to have” anymore. It’s the bare minimum for web standards, and how you handle it affects how people see your business. Building for people with disabilities matters for social reasons, and the effect on the technical quality of your web product, and on sales, is immense.

Here are the main reasons website accessibility matters:

• It reaches a large audience. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, or 1 in 6 of us, experience significant disability. In the U.S., the CDC reports that more than 1 in 4 adults have some type of disability.
• It improves usability for everyone. Clear navigation, readable text, good contrast and captions help older users, people with temporary injuries and anyone using a phone in bright sunlight or a noisy place.
• It supports SEO. Headings, alt text, descriptive links and transcripts help search engines and AI tools understand your content, the same way they help screen readers.
• It protects your brand and revenue. Visitors who can’t complete a purchase or submit a form leave, and usually don’t come back.
• It reduces legal risk. Website accessibility lawsuits are common in the U.S., and accessibility is now written into law for many organizations in the U.S. and EU (more on that below).

There’s still a long way to go. WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, averaging 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons and missing page language accounted for 96% of those errors, and all of them are fixable.

Who benefits from web accessibility?

People’s cognitive and physical abilities vary enormously, and an inaccessible website affects far more people than those who are legally disabled. People who are aging, temporarily injured or living with chronic physical or cognitive conditions can also hit barriers when using your web product.

When we build for the users who face the most barriers, we end up building for everyone else along the way. That’s what real inclusivity and accessibility look like in practice.

What is WCAG?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for web accessibility, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The current version is WCAG 2.2, first published in October 2023 and last updated in December 2024. The W3C recommends using the latest version.

WCAG is organized around four principles, often shortened to POUR:

• Perceivable: information can be seen, heard or otherwise sensed, for example through alt text, captions and sufficient contrast.
• Operable: everything works with a keyboard and other input methods, and users have enough time and control.
• Understandable: content and interactions are clear, predictable and help people avoid and fix mistakes.
• Robust: code works reliably with browsers and assistive technologies, now and as they change.

Each guideline has testable success criteria at three levels: A (minimum), AA (the level most laws and policies reference) and AAA (enhanced). Most organizations should aim for WCAG 2.2 AA.

What’s new in WCAG 2.2?

WCAG 2.2 keeps everything in WCAG 2.1 (apart from one obsolete criterion on parsing) and adds new success criteria that mainly help people with low vision, motor disabilities and cognitive or learning disabilities. Highlights include:

• Keyboard focus that isn’t hidden behind sticky headers, banners or pop-ups
• A minimum target size for buttons and links (24 by 24 CSS pixels, with exceptions)
• An alternative to dragging movements, such as sliders or drag-and-drop
• Help, such as contact details, placed consistently across pages
• No need to re-enter information users already provided in the same process
• Login that doesn’t rely on memory tests or puzzles alone

The W3C is also drafting WCAG 3.0, a broader rework of the guidelines. It’s still an early draft, so WCAG 2.2 remains the standard to design and test against.

Is web accessibility a legal requirement?

When we first published this post in 2019, there were no formal U.S. laws setting technical rules for web accessibility. That gap is exactly what left businesses exposed. Many overlooked the issue, even though the number of ADA web accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court each year had almost tripled since 2013. We expected federal measures to follow, and they have.

Here’s where things stand today:

• Businesses open to the public (ADA Title III): The Department of Justice’s 2022 guidance on web accessibility says the ADA covers goods and services offered on the web, so businesses must make them accessible. There’s no Title III regulation naming a specific standard, and the DOJ points to WCAG as helpful guidance.
• State and local governments (ADA Title II): A 2024 DOJ rule requires websites and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. In April 2026, the DOJ extended the compliance dates to April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. Websites and apps provided through contractors are covered too.
• Federal agencies (Section 508): Federal agencies must make their information and communication technology accessible under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
• The European Union: The European Accessibility Act, which has applied since June 2025, requires accessible e-commerce, banking and other products and services from businesses selling into EU member states.

Lawsuits haven’t slowed down. According to Seyfarth Shaw’s count, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in U.S. federal court in 2025, about 27% more than in 2024. Protecting your company from that exposure is an easy call. This post isn’t legal advice, so check your specific obligations with counsel.

How do common disabilities affect the way people use the web?

Let’s look at some common disabilities and impairments, and how they change the way someone uses the web. Each section ends with questions to help you consider whether your web product is up to accessibility standards.

Visual impairments

Visual impairments range from minor differences in the ability to see to significant vision loss in one or both eyes, and include color blindness and low vision. In 2015, The Vision Council reported that about 188.7 million Americans, just over 3 out of every 4 adults, wore some form of vision correction. Its more recent research puts the share of U.S. adults using vision correction at more than 80%.

So a large majority of the people visiting your site may have some form of visual impairment.

Questions to ask about visual accessibility

• Does your website use color combinations with insufficient contrast between foreground and background colors? (WebAIM’s contrast checker is a quick way to test.)
• Does your website use overcomplicated fonts and/or navigation bars?
• Are all call-to-action buttons easily identifiable in size and color? Is the text clear and descriptive of the action?
• Do all images on your site include a text alternative, for example a caption or alt text?
• If a user with a vision impairment navigated your site with a screen reader, would all the required information be coded so the screen reader could interpret it correctly?
• Does the page still work when text is enlarged to 200% or the screen is zoomed?

Hearing impairments

People who are deaf or hard of hearing rely on text alternatives for audio. Captions also help anyone watching video with the sound off.

Questions to ask about hearing accessibility

• Do all videos with sound have accurate captions?
• Do podcasts and audio-only content have transcripts?
• Can people contact you without making a phone call?

Cognitive, learning and neurological differences

This covers a huge range of conditions and differences. What they share is an effect on how a person processes and understands information.

Questions to ask about cognitive accessibility

• Is it easy to understand how to find information on your website and how to move from one area of the site to the next?
• How complex is the language used to communicate information on your website?
• Are complicated concepts communicated through a variety of formats, such as a mix of graphs, tables and images along with the text?
• Do any moving or flickering elements exist? If so, can the user turn these effects off easily and promptly? (Our guide to adding animation to your website covers motion with purpose.)

Physical impairments

Navigating a website on a computer or smartphone requires upper body movement, hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. Any condition that affects one of these needs to be planned for.

Questions to ask about physical accessibility

• Can your website be navigated using keyboard strokes alone?
• Is your navigation simple and easy to use, or does it require complicated hovers or other barriers to click-throughs?
• Does your website time out or log users out if they’ve been inactive for a while, and can they extend their time?
• Are buttons and links large enough to tap easily on a phone?

That’s the human side of web accessibility. Now for the technical side. What does building an accessible web product actually involve?

What does an accessible website require?

Design

Accessibility belongs in every stage of website design and build. An experienced UX/UI designer will take accessibility principles into account during wireframing and design. Those decisions reach from the basic layout and user flow of your website down to small details, like the colors and fonts on call-to-action buttons and headings.

Development

On the development side, accessibility means coding your website so your content works with the tools people with disabilities use to get online, such as screen readers that convert text into audio, speech recognition software that turns a user’s voice into text, braille displays and alternative keyboards. These tools rely on specific markup in your site’s code, such as semantic HTML, form labels and ARIA attributes. That markup is invisible to most visitors, but it makes a website dramatically easier to use for people with impairments.

How can you make your website more accessible?

After coming this far, you may be feeling overwhelmed, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. How you make your website more accessible depends on where you are in the web product lifecycle.

If you’re building a new product, hire the professionals. Much like SEO, accessibility works best when it’s built into the blueprint of your website, and any professional digital partner will consider it when building your site. Make it part of your discovery process: ask your team what they know about web accessibility and how they plan to build it into your new website before you get started. Our design and development teams build to WCAG from the first wireframe.

If you have an existing web product and don’t have the resources to rebuild, start with an accessibility audit and fix the issues it finds in priority order. Many problems, such as contrast, alt text, form labels and heading structure, can be fixed without a redesign.

There are also many third-party tools that can be installed on an existing website. These tools can give users control over color contrast, text size and other display settings. Use them with care, though. Overlay widgets can’t fix problems in your underlying code, and they don’t make a site compliant on their own. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order requiring one overlay vendor to pay $1 million over claims that its product could make any website WCAG-compliant. Treat these tools as a supplement to real fixes, not a substitute.

Finally, keep it accessible. New pages, plugins and content can introduce new barriers, so build accessibility checks into ongoing website management, and re-test after major updates.

That’s a basic introduction to web accessibility, along with some ways to refactor your current web product to meet today’s standards. If you’d like an accessibility audit or help making your site more accessible, Daylight’s team is happy to help.

Web accessibility is important because it lets everyone use your website. The work that opens your site to people with disabilities also makes it faster, clearer and easier to find for every other visitor. Build to WCAG 2.2 AA, test with real people and keep it accessible as your site grows.