Website Accessibility: The 7 Fixes That Help the Most People

Roughly one in six people lives with some form of disability, and far more experience situational limits — bright sunlight, a broken trackpad, ageing eyes, a noisy room. Accessibility isn't a niche checkbox; it's usability for the humans you actually have.

The full WCAG standard runs to hundreds of criteria and can paralyse a small team. So here's the honest shortcut: seven fixes, ranked by people-helped per hour of effort. Do these before anything else.

1. Fix Your Colour Contrast

Light grey text on white backgrounds is the web's most common accessibility failure, and it hurts everyone — low-vision users severely, everyone else on a phone in daylight. Aim for a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for body text (free checkers abound; WebAIM's is the classic). This is usually a one-line CSS change with sitewide impact.

2. Write Real Alt Text

Every meaningful image needs a text alternative for screen reader users — and it doubles as SEO. The craft takes five seconds per image once you know the rules; our guide with before/afters is here, and the free Alt Text Writer drafts them for you at scale.

3. Make Everything Reachable by Keyboard

Unplug your mouse and try to use your site: Tab through links, Enter to activate, Escape to close. Motor-impaired users, power users and screen reader users all live on the keyboard. The commonest sins — menus that only open on hover, modals you can't escape, invisible focus outlines — are each small fixes.

4. Label Your Forms Properly

Placeholder text is not a label (it vanishes when you type, and screen readers often miss it). Every input needs a real, visible label; every error message needs to say what's wrong and how to fix it, next to the field. Forms are where accessibility failures cost you actual money — an uncompletable checkout is a refund to your competitor.

5. Use Headings as Structure, Not Styling

Screen reader users navigate by heading — it's their table of contents. One h1 per page, h2s for sections, h3s inside them, no skipping levels because "h4 looks nicer". This costs nothing and transforms navigation for assistive tech (and, again, pleases search engines — structure is dual-use).

6. Calm Your Motion

Auto-playing carousels, parallax effects and flashing animations range from annoying (everyone) to nauseating (vestibular disorders) to dangerous (photosensitive epilepsy). Respect the prefers-reduced-motion setting, never flash more than three times per second, and give every carousel a pause button — or better, delete the carousel; nobody has ever missed one.

7. Give Users Adaptation Controls

Even a well-built site can't anticipate every need: dyslexic readers may want a different font, colour-blind users different palettes, some visitors need text read aloud. This is where an accessibility widget earns its place — as a layer of user-side adjustments on top of (never instead of) fixes 1–6.

Cocoon's A11y Widget adds 33+ such controls — text-to-speech, dyslexia-friendly font, colour-blind filters, dark mode, text scaling and more — with one line of code. It's free, open-source, and tracks nothing. Setup guide: one line of code, five minutes.

The Honest Sequencing

Fixes 1–6 are foundations; the widget is fix 7, not fix 1 — a distinction cheap overlay vendors blur, and one we address head-on in Do Accessibility Widgets Actually Work?. Do the foundations (a focused afternoon for most small sites), add the widget for the needs you can't predict, and you'll be more accessible than the vast majority of the web — including, probably, your competitors.