Web Accessibility

Web accessibility means building websites that can be used by everyone, including people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities. That covers everything from screen reader compatibility and keyboard navigation to color contrast, text sizing, form labels, focus indicators, and meaningful alt text. Roughly 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. has some form of disability, and many more use assistive technologies temporarily — recovering from surgery, dealing with a broken arm, or simply aging into reduced vision or dexterity. An accessible site isn't a separate experience built for a niche audience. It's the same site, built to work correctly for more people.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international technical standard that defines what accessible web content looks like — it's organized into levels A, AA, and AAA, with AA being the most commonly targeted standard. The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is U.S. federal law that requires businesses to provide equal access, and courts have increasingly interpreted that to include websites. Section 508 applies specifically to federal agencies and organizations that receive federal funding. In practice, WCAG 2.1 AA is the benchmark I audit against because it satisfies the technical requirements that ADA case law references and Section 508 now formally adopts. Meeting WCAG AA doesn't guarantee you'll never face a legal challenge, but it puts you on solid ground.

Yes — for practical, legal, and ethical reasons. On the practical side, accessibility improvements often improve usability for everyone: cleaner navigation, better form design, faster keyboard interaction, and more logical page structure. These are things that help all users, not just those with disabilities. On the legal side, ADA-related web accessibility lawsuits have increased significantly year over year, and they're not limited to large corporations — small and mid-size businesses get targeted too, particularly in industries like healthcare, retail, hospitality, and professional services. On the ethical side, if your website can't be used by someone with a disability, you're excluding potential customers. That's a problem worth fixing.

I run a combination of automated scanning and manual testing. Automated tools catch the measurable stuff — missing alt text, insufficient color contrast, empty form labels, broken heading hierarchy, missing language attributes. But automated tools only catch about 30 to 40 percent of accessibility issues. The rest requires manual testing: navigating the entire site with a keyboard only, testing with screen readers (NVDA, VoiceOver), checking focus order and visible focus indicators, verifying that interactive elements announce their state correctly, evaluating content structure and reading order, and testing dynamic content like modals, accordions, and dropdown menus. You'll receive a detailed report documenting every issue found, its WCAG success criterion, its severity, and a specific recommendation for how to fix it.

Both. I can deliver a standalone audit report your team or developer can act on, or I can handle the remediation myself — fixing the issues directly in your site's code, theme, templates, and content. For WordPress sites, fixes typically involve a combination of theme and template modifications, plugin configuration changes, custom CSS and JavaScript, content updates (alt text, heading structure, link text), and in some cases replacing inaccessible plugins or components with accessible alternatives. I prioritize fixes by impact — critical barriers that prevent access come first, then issues that cause significant difficulty, then best-practice improvements.

Accessibility overlays — the toolbar widgets that promise one-line-of-code compliance — don't work, and the accessibility community has been vocal about this for years. They can't fix structural problems in your HTML, they often interfere with actual assistive technologies like screen readers, they create a separate and inferior experience for disabled users, and they do not satisfy WCAG requirements or provide legal protection. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against businesses using overlays, with courts ruling that the overlay did not make the site accessible. If someone is selling you a quick fix for accessibility, they're selling you liability with a badge on it. The only reliable path to accessibility is fixing the actual code and content.