7 things you may not know about web accessibility

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there.

Inspired by Digital Accessibility Week 2026, I wanted share some accessibility insights — and clear up some misunderstandings. But before we start: what is accessibility, and why does it matter?

Accessibility means making your content perceivable, understandable and usable to disabled people. This matters because 1 in 5 people in the UK are disabled, and they don’t have a choice about using public services. If public sector websites and apps aren’t designed accessibly, we exclude people from a world that is now digital by default.

While awareness and understanding of web accessibility has come a long way, there’s a lot most people probably don’t realise. Here are 7 things about web accessibility you might not know…

1. Accessibility tools only find 30 to 40 percent of issues

It’s easy to understand the appeal of automated accessibility tool scores: they feel objective, and churn out reassuringly concrete numbers.

But while these tools are helpful, they’re only a guide — not a definitive evaluation.

For a start, run half a dozen different tools over your website and you’ll probably get half a dozen different scores. They also produce a fair amount of false positives (issues that aren’t actually issues when you check them).

But the real problem with these tools is most of them can only find about 30 to 40 percent of accessibility issues. This makes sense: to properly check a website is perceivable, understandable and usable for humans, you need to validate that as a real-life human.

For example: accessibility tools can find links on your site, but they can’t tell you if the purpose of the link is clear from the link text alone. That requires a person who can understand the context of the link within the surrounding content.

The point here is not to ignore accessibility tools, but avoid fixating on metrics as a definitive measure of how accessible you are.

The source for the 30-to-40-percent stat is a 2018 test of different automated tools. So things have probably changed a bit, but the principle will still be the same: don’t rely solely on automated testing for accessibility.

2. Alt text is more nuanced than many people realise

You might know that visual content should have a text alternative. Accessibility nerds know this as criteria 1.1.1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

For images, this means there needs to be alternative (alt) text describing it. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. A lot more.

To start with, logos and other decorative images don’t need alt text, However, it’s important to understand what ‘decorative’ means (it refers to images that aren’t critical to understanding the content).

For example, an image of school children on a school term dates webpage would be decorative. Why? Because the image doesn’t help anyone understand when the summer holidays start.

However, an image of a pothole on a page about reporting potholes could be informative. It could help someone understand what a pothole looks like (and what’s worth reporting). That means you need clear, descriptive alternative text for the image.

But there’s a deeper purpose to text alternatives for visual content: alt text is not just to help people perceive and understand the image, but to give them an equivalent experience of it.

To explain this concept, take this image from a fostering website:

You could write alt text for this image that says:

A black girl wearing a beige top and ripped jeans and an older white woman wearing glasses and a cream-coloured cardigan sitting on the floor smiling next to a blue sofa in a living room.

This is the kind of neutral, factual and long-winded description AI might generate. But it lacks context, and doesn’t provide an equivalent experience of the image. The physical characteristics, clothing and location details don’t matter in this case — the image is all about the tone and emotional feeling it conveys. So instead, you should probably write something like:

A teenage girl and her foster carer looking relaxed, comfortable and happy at home. They’re laughing, completely at ease with each other.

This shows that writing alt text isn’t just admin. It’s design. You’re designing the experience of the image for non-sighted people using words. That requires context, and it’s why you shouldn’t always generate alt text using AI.

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has published some good practices for writing alt text. My personal top tip: avoid excessively long descriptions. A picture might paint a thousand words, but no one wants to to read that much for each image.

3. Meeting WCAG Level AA doesn’t mean you’re accessible

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard variations of this exchange:

• Stakeholder/customer: “Is the website/app/portal accessible?”
• Supplier/designer: “Yes, it’s compliant with Level AA of WCAG 2.2”.

For a start, claims about accessibility compliance are often a lie. I’ve tested many enterprise software products sold as ‘compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA’ and found multiple issues out of the box.

But the real point I want to make here is thinking about accessibility the wrong way: Level AA of the WCAG is a legal minimum — it doesn’t mean your product or system is highly accessible.

As Rebekah Barry points out in her excellent book Considerate Content, much of the WCAG criteria that relates to readability is Level AAA — above the legal requirement. This includes things like unusual words, abbreviations and pronunciations, as well as criteria about reading level.

Considerate Content is worth reading. Image by Ben Holliday

While complying with legal accessibility standards can be an achievement, it shouldn’t be the limit of your ambitions. Organisations often talk about meeting Level AA with pride, but this is setting the bar as low as you legally can. Complying with regulations is surely a basic expectation of an organisation, not something to be proud of.

The real aspiration should be to go above and beyond what’s legally required. That shows commitment to values around inclusion and equality. It’s not easy, and won’t be practical for most organisations to cover all WCAG Level AAA criteria. But it’s something you can work towards.

However, there’s a caveat to even achieving WCAG Level AAA status…

4. ‘Fully accessible’ is a myth

I have bad news for you: even if you nail every A, AA and AAA-level criteria of the WCAG, you still won’t be fully accessible.

Why?

Firstly, while it seems like a comprehensive set of guidelines, the WCAG don’t cover everything. For example, they focus more on visual and auditory disabilities than cognitive or learning impairments.

The WCAG also don’t cover how to make content accessible for neurodivergent people, or those with conditions like bipolar disorder, depression or aphasia. You may not consider some of those things a disability, but if your site or app is designed without those needs in mind it could be disabling for those people. (This is the social model of disability.)

Second, some of the WCAG acceptance criteria isn’t as bullet-proof as it appears. For example, the WCAG say if text has a 4.5:1 contrast ratio to the background colour it’s accessible. However, there are permutations that would pass WCAG but do not have strong contrast. And it can work the other way too: some contrasts would fail WCAG’s 4.5:1 ration test, but are very readable.

The image below shows this issue, and how a new method called Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) will address the problem in the next version of the WCAG. (You can read more about the difference between WCAG and APCA.)

WCAG versus APCA. Image by WebAIM.

But thirdly and most importantly: some accessibility needs conflict with others. For example, I’ve run focus groups for a website design where:

• a dyslexic person liked that the design included a lot of images and icons, because it helped them understand how to use the site without reading as much.
• an autistic person disliked the images and icons, because they were ambiguous and distracting compared to a simpler text-based layout.

These are fundamentally different needs. Not preferences. Needs.

These differences can be partially reconciled through adding built-in accessibility tools or people using their own assistive technology to customise their experience. (Be warned that a lot of accessibility advocates don’t think you should use overlays).

And maybe in future AI could help, by generating bespoke versions of a website personalised to the user’s individual access needs. (Although whether this would be practical or ethical is a different matter.)

But the point is it’s not practical create a single version of a product that’s universally accessible for everyone. In reality, you’re often faced with a trade-off in which you have to prioritise one group of users’ needs over others.

This might seem discouraging. But stay positive, make reasonable choices you can justify, and focus on where you can add the most real-world benefit with the resources and constraints that you have.

Fully accessible might be a myth, but it’s something you can always strive for.

5. Everyone is disabled, sometimes

A lot of people think of disability as a fixed, binary thing: you’re either disabled or you’re not.

But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.

For a start, many non-disabled people will go on to develop a disability as they age. Viewed one way, you’re not so much non-disabled but pre-disabled.

Disabilities can also be temporary or permanent. For example, you might have an eye operation that impairs your vision for a while, then it comes back. But while it was gone, you were disabled.

And then there’s the concept of situational disability. This is when you’re impaired by your environment. For example:

• Bright light and sun glare make it hard to see what’s on your screen
• Wearing headphones makes you less aware of your surroundings
• Holding a baby in one arm means you can only use a device one-handed
• Extreme tiredness impairs your cognitive abilities

Situational disabilities. Image by Department for Education

Everyone is situationally disabled sometimes. This is why it’s important to make content accessible in as many ways as possible, to as many people as possible. That’s the ethos of inclusive design.

6. Accessible content is better for everyone

Despite how far accessibility has come, I still sense some people see it as a niche consideration that benefits very few people in reality.

But even if that were true — it’s not — there’s still a very good reason for making content more accessible: it benefits everyone.

For example, accessibility guidelines say do not publish images containing text. People with low vision or using screen readers can’t perceive this text, meaning they miss out. But adding text to images can also run into contrast issues, which impacts everyone — see below:

So this rule about text and images helps create a cleaner and more usable experience for all. Think about it: would you rather use a webpage with clear photos, or one covered in a dozen differently branded graphics each with their own styles and sizes of text?

Another example: accessibility guidelines advise to write link text that makes sense on its own. This is so people with screen readers can understand the purpose of each link without any other context.

But this approach also helps everyone. If every link says “click here”, it requires more mental effort to read around the link to figure out where it’ll take you. (I recommend reading Matthew Hirst’s article explaining how ‘click here’ is a silent killer of user experience for more on generic link text.)

7. You should be sceptical of anyone with all the answers

The more you learn about accessibility, the less straightforward it seems. It’s not always a world of simple rules and clear answers, but one of nuance, complexity and competing needs.

The correct response to a lot of queries about accessibility is: ‘it depends’. How you should design more accessibly in future or improve accessibility of existing products is dependent on context, resources and constraints.

Accessibility experts also disagree, as experts often do in most fields.

So be sceptical of anyone who tells you, with absolute certainty, what you should do about accessibility in every situation — especially if you haven’t given them much context. They might be giving you bad advice.

The truth is that no one knows everything about accessibility. We each only have our own perspective, based on personal experience, research and what we’ve read. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never be able to understand every accessibility need. (This is another reason why your website will never be accessible for everyone.)

Conclusion

So how should you approach accessibility, now you know all these things?

I’m not going to tell you about specific books, courses or tools to use. Instead, here are the mindset and principles I’d encourage you to have around accessibility:

• Be curious. Self-educate yourself about accessibility. There’s a lot of free information out there. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything (some of it’s very dry and technical). Anything you learn is useful.
• Be empathetic. Do more research. Talk to your service users about their needs. Talk to your colleagues. Try to understand different perspectives and experiences of accessing digital content.
• Be assertive. Promote accessibility internally. Explain to stakeholders why it matters. Talk about how a diverse workforce with more disabled people will help you design more accessible services.
• Avoid fixating on tools and metrics. Try to embrace the big picture of accessibility, rather than just thinking about it as compliance with a checklist.