Why every public website should pass an accessibility audit, and how to start

The web consortium's guidelines set out, in testable terms, what makes a page usable by someone who cannot see it, cannot use a mouse or cannot hear a video. The current version added requirements for focus visibility and target size. (W3C, 2023)

Most failures are mundane: images without text alternatives, forms whose labels are not attached to their fields, colour contrast too low to read in sunlight.

Start with the keyboard

Unplug the mouse and try to use the site. Where you get stuck, a screen-reader user is stuck too. Automated checkers catch perhaps a third of problems; the rest need a person.