Website Design and Development
Accessibility
Within Website Design and Development, this is the piece that build so the site works for people using it differently, which is both a legal and a commercial matter.
Accessibility, defined
Build so the site works for people using it differently, which is both a legal and a commercial matter. In practice that means audit against the current accessibility success criteria at the target level, and then the harder half: keyboard navigation, focus management and semantic structure.
Why this work exists
Left alone, this does not fail loudly. It degrades, and the first sign is a number moving the wrong way three months later.
This is one part of Website Design and Development, described separately because it is usually the first thing anybody needs.
The nearest piece of work to it is giving images a size so the page stops jumping. Where that is already handled, this moves faster than the estimate; where it is not, the two get done together or neither of them holds.
What good looks like
The useful version ends with a decision somebody can act on this month, not a report somebody files.
The gap between that and where most accounts start is why this is scoped as accessibility rather than as a line inside something larger. Planning the redirect map before the old site goes away is the usual second step once it is in place.
When this is the right work
What tells you to start here:
- Accessibility was checked with an automated tool and declared done
- The site cannot be used without a mouse
- A complaint or a legal letter has arrived
If none of those is true, something else is probably the constraint, and the Website Design and Development overview maps the alternatives. The usual neighbours are making the print stylesheet work because people still print quotes and deciding what the site does when a third party is down.
What the work covers
Four items, each with an output:
- Audit against the current accessibility success criteria at the target level, which changes often enough that a single pass has a shelf life.
- Keyboard navigation, focus management and semantic structure, handled before the parts that depend on it rather than alongside them.
- Screen reader testing with actual assistive technology, handled before the parts that depend on it rather than alongside them.
- Documentation of conformance and a plan for what remains, revisited rather than finished, because the inputs keep moving.
How it runs
What happens, in the order it happens.
The cheap wins
Anything that can be fixed in an afternoon gets fixed in the first week, partly because it is free progress and partly because it clears the view.
Setting the guardrails
Limits get agreed early: what will not be touched, what needs sign-off, what can be changed without asking. Arguments about scope mostly trace back to skipping this.
Testing on the awkward cases
Whatever gets built is checked against the messy real examples rather than the clean ones, because the clean ones were never going to be the problem.
What each part runs into
What gets in the way, part by part:
- Audit against the current accessibility success criteria at the target level, and in Bengaluru the constraint on it is a language mix the content has to match rather than assume
- Keyboard navigation, focus management and semantic structure, harder in Surat because of an enquiry path that runs through a messaging app rather than a form
- Screen reader testing with actual assistive technology – in Sharjah, complicated by the fact that a catchment smaller than the ambition on the website
- Documentation of conformance and a plan for what remains, which in New York runs into an incumbent whose position comes from presence rather than effort
Where this usually goes wrong
Relying on an overlay widget. They do not deliver conformance, they are frequently a worse experience, and they have been the subject of litigation themselves.
It is a cheap mistake to avoid and an expensive one to discover six months in.
How it is measured
Conformance against the target criteria, verified manually. Agreed up front and reported every period, with the raw data available rather than only a summary.
Looked at next to the previous quarter rather than next to the target, which is the only comparison that says anything.
What you end up with
At the end of the engagement there is a conformance audit with findings remediated, verified with assistive technology, and a documented statement.
Written to be read by somebody who was not in the meetings.
How it differs by sector
The sector decides what the constraint actually is:
- Manufacturing and industrial: Low volume, high value, and a specification sheet that decides the deal. so this work has to account for that before anything else.
- Automotive, where Local inventory, model-level demand, and a buyer who arrives having already decided. which moves this work earlier in the plan.
- In Ecommerce and retail the binding constraint is that margin per order decides everything, and the product feed is usually the weakest asset.
The industry pages carry the rest of that detail. Manufacturing and industrial and Automotive are the two where this piece of work most often decides the outcome.
Common questions
Is automated accessibility testing sufficient?
No. Automated tools reliably catch a minority of real issues, largely the mechanical ones. Whether a task can actually be completed with a keyboard and a screen reader, whether focus order makes sense, and whether the content is comprehensible when read aloud all need a person. The automated pass is the start, not the finish.
Do accessibility overlays work?
Not as a conformance solution. They operate on the rendered page without fixing the underlying markup, they frequently interfere with the assistive technology a user already has configured, and their claims of automatic compliance have been directly challenged in litigation. The work has to happen in the code.
Does anything need doing before accessibility?
Sometimes. The signals above are the honest test, and where something upstream is the real constraint we will name it even though it is not the work on this page. Both Should we block AI crawlers? and Should we use a website builder or WordPress? assume this page, so they are the natural next two.
Is there a minimum worth doing?
There is a point below which the measurement cannot detect a change, and we would rather say so than take the work. Conformance against the target criteria, verified manually has to be able to move for the engagement to mean anything. If the brief is still open, Server-side tracking and Service area business are the two that change it most often.
Does this have to be bought separately from Website Design and Development?
No. It is usually part of a wider Website Design and Development engagement, and it is described separately because it is the piece clients most often ask about by name. It can also be scoped on its own where that is genuinely what is needed, and we will say which applies after looking. Next: Answer Engine Optimization for Education and training. After that, App Store Optimization for Education and training, which is where the trade-offs live.
Ask about accessibility
Describe what is not working in a sentence. We will tell you whether this is the right piece of work or whether something else is binding.
Ask us the question you cannot get answered
Tell us what you sell and what is not working. We will come back with the two or three things we would look at before anything else.