Accessibility is often treated as a legal checkbox: something that has to be there because it has to be. That is a shame, because it is one of the few topics where the legal requirement, the user experience and search visibility all point in roughly the same direction. A website that works well with a screen reader is almost always a website Google understands well.

What WCAG is

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard for digital accessibility. The current version is 2.2. The guidelines have three levels: A (minimum), AA (the level virtually all legislation refers to) and AAA (very strict, rarely fully achievable in practice).

When someone refers to "an accessible website", they generally mean WCAG 2.2 level AA. That is also the level we build to as standard.

Does your website have to comply?

Dutch government and semi-government bodies have had a legal obligation for some time, including publishing an accessibility statement. In addition, the European Accessibility Act has widened the scope to a number of commercial services, among them e-commerce, banking, transport and telecoms.

Whether your organisation falls under it depends on your sector and size; exemptions exist for small enterprises. We are not lawyers, so for a firm answer on your situation we would point you to your own legal adviser. What we can say: the number of organisations required to comply is growing, and retrofitting accessibility is considerably more expensive than getting it right the first time.

The four principles

WCAG is built around four principles. Everything in the guideline falls into one of these.

Perceivable. Information must be visible or audible to everyone. Think alt text on images, captions on video and sufficient colour contrast.
Operable. Everything must work without a mouse. A visitor navigating by keyboard must be able to reach every menu, form and button, and see where the focus is.
Understandable. Language and interaction must be predictable. Form error messages explain what is wrong and how to fix it.
Robust. The code must be correct enough for assistive software to work with it, now and in five years.

What it means in practice

Most accessibility problems we encounter are not exotic. It is the same things every time:

Light grey text on white, because it looks calm in the design. Contrast ratio must be at least 4.5:1 for normal text.
Form fields without an associated label, so a screen reader announces only "edit field".
Headings chosen by size rather than hierarchy, for instance an h4 because it happened to be the right dimension.
Links reading "read more", which are meaningless out of context.
Menus and modals that can only be closed with a mouse.
Images with alt text like "image1.jpg", or a decorative image that does get read aloud.

Each of these costs almost no time during the build, and requires a substantial correction round afterwards.

The overlap with search visibility

A correct heading structure helps a screen reader navigate and helps Google understand how your page is built. Descriptive link text helps both. Alt text makes your images findable in Google Images. Captions make video searchable. Accessibility and SEO are not separate projects; they share a large part of their checklist.

What it costs

Building it in from the start costs little extra: it lives mostly in design choices and careful implementation. We do not charge a surcharge for it, because it is part of how we work. Bringing an existing website up to level AA afterwards is another story, and those costs depend heavily on how the site was built.

Want to know where your current website stands? Start with a keyboard test: put your mouse aside and try to complete a form on your site using only the Tab key. If you get stuck, so do your visitors.

We build to WCAG 2.2 level AA as standard, including for clients who are not required to. Read more about our approach to web design or put your situation to us.