A website can look polished, load quickly and still be difficult or impossible for some people to use.
Website accessibility is not an extra feature added once the design is finished. It is part of building a website that works properly for the people who need it.
A button may not work without a mouse. A form field may not have a clear label. Text may blend into its background. A menu may open with a keyboard but offer no obvious way to close it.
These can look like small technical issues. For the person trying to use the website, they are barriers.
What website accessibility actually means.
Website accessibility means designing and developing websites so that people with different abilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with them.
This includes people with visual, auditory, physical, neurological, speech and cognitive disabilities. It also includes people whose needs change temporarily or depending on their environment.
The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, experience a significant disability. That is roughly one in six people.
Accessible design can also help someone using a phone in bright sunlight, navigating with one hand, watching a video without sound or dealing with a temporary injury.
Website accessibility is therefore not about designing for a small, separate group. It is about recognising that people use websites in different ways.
Understanding WCAG 2.2.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, usually shortened to WCAG, provide the internationally recognised standard for making digital content more accessible.
The guidelines are organised into three levels:
Level A covers essential accessibility requirements.
Level AA addresses a broader range of common barriers and is often used as an organisational target.
Level AAA includes the most extensive requirements and may not be achievable for every type of content.
WCAG 2.2 introduced nine additional success criteria covering areas such as visible keyboard focus, target sizes, dragging movements, consistent help and accessible authentication.
The guidelines may be technical, but their purpose is straightforward. People should be able to find information, understand content and complete important actions without unnecessary barriers.
Most websites still have accessibility problems.
Accessibility issues are more common than many businesses realise.
WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of one million high-traffic homepages found automatically detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of the pages tested, with an average of 56.1 errors per homepage.
Some of the most common problems were also among the most basic:
Low colour contrast
Missing alternative text for images
Form fields without proper labels
Empty or unclear links
Buttons without accessible names
Missing page language information
These issues affect everyday website elements such as navigation, enquiry forms, calls to action, images and page content.
They can also affect business performance. A visitor who cannot complete a form will not become a lead. A customer who cannot use a checkout will not complete a purchase. Someone who struggles to read or navigate the page may simply leave.
Accessibility improves the experience for everyone.
Many accessibility improvements are also good user experience practices.
Clear heading structures make pages easier to scan. Descriptive link text helps people understand where a link will take them. Strong colour contrast improves readability. Properly labelled forms reduce confusion. Keyboard-friendly navigation gives visitors more ways to move through a website.
These improvements can make the website easier to use for everyone, not only people using assistive technology.
Accessibility can also support:
A clearer and more consistent user experience
Greater reach across different audiences
Stronger brand trust
Better long-term website quality
Lower risk of accessibility issues becoming embedded across the site
The goal is not simply to achieve a better score. It is to create a website that removes friction instead of adding it.
Case study: improving accessibility from 48% to 89%.
Koola recently worked with a global financial services organisation to improve its website accessibility against WCAG 2.2 criteria.
The challenge.
The website’s overall accessibility score was approximately 48%, well below the organisation’s target of 80%.
The project required more than a single technical fix. Koola needed to identify the barriers affecting accessibility, prioritise the most important issues and improve performance across key pages, templates and components.
What Koola did.
Koola reviewed the issues identified through the accessibility assessment and worked through them in a structured way.
The process included:
Prioritising high-impact accessibility issues
Reviewing key templates and interactive elements
Implementing the required technical and content improvements
Retesting the website as fixes were completed
Tracking progress against the 80% target
This allowed the team to focus on practical improvements rather than treating accessibility as a once-off box-ticking exercise.
The result.
Following the work, the website’s overall accessibility score increased from approximately 48% to 89%.
That represents an improvement of around 41 percentage points and took the website comfortably beyond its target.
The website also achieved:
91.1% at Level A
87.4% at Level AA
84.2% at Level AAA
The result shows what can happen when accessibility issues are identified clearly, prioritised properly and addressed across the website as a whole.
It is important to distinguish an automated score from a formal statement of complete WCAG conformance. Automated tools are valuable for identifying issues and tracking progress, but they cannot evaluate every part of the real user experience.
WebAIM makes the same distinction in its accessibility reporting, noting that the absence of automatically detected errors does not prove that a page is fully accessible or conformant.
The strongest approach combines automated monitoring with expert review, manual testing and ongoing maintenance.
An accessibility audit is only the starting point.
An audit can show where problems exist, but identifying an issue is not the same as resolving it.
Some barriers can be detected automatically. Others require human judgement.
A tool may confirm that an image has alternative text, for example, but it cannot always determine whether that description is useful. It may detect headings without knowing whether the page structure makes sense. It may find a button in the code without confirming that a keyboard user can operate it easily.
A thorough accessibility process may include:
Automated testing across priority pages
Manual keyboard navigation
Screen reader testing
Reviews of forms and important user journeys
Colour contrast and focus-state checks
Assessment of headings and semantic structure
Testing across browsers, devices and screen sizes
Assessing existing content and improving where necessary
The aim is not to chase a perfect dashboard. It is to remove barriers that affect real people.
Accessibility should be built into the website process.
Fixing accessibility issues after a website has already been designed and developed can take more time than considering them from the beginning.
Designers need to think about contrast, readability, layouts and interaction states. Developers need to use appropriate semantic code and ensure components work in different ways. Content teams need to write clear headings, meaningful links and useful image descriptions.
Accessibility should form part of the full website process:
Planning
User experience
Design
Development
Content
Testing
Ongoing maintenance
It also requires attention after launch. New pages, plugins, forms, documents and design changes can introduce fresh accessibility problems over time.
Regular reviews make it easier to identify and resolve these issues before they spread across the website.
A better website starts with fewer barriers.
Website accessibility should not be viewed as a specialist feature that only matters to certain organisations.
It is simply part of good website design.
An accessible website helps more people find what they need, understand what they are seeing and complete the actions they came to take. It also gives businesses a stronger digital foundation that supports usability, trust and long-term performance.
Koola builds custom websites around real business goals, with a focus on functionality, performance, scalability and a seamless user experience.
Is your website working as well as it should for every visitor? Talk to our team about building a clearer, more accessible digital experience.
