Designing for Accessibility: A Practical Starter Guide

Why Accessibility Is a Product Decision

Accessibility is often framed as a legal requirement or a nice-to-have. It's neither — it's a product quality decision. An accessible product is a better product: clearer hierarchy, more consistent interactions, and wider reach.

Here's how to get started without overhauling everything at once.

Start With the Basics

Colour contrast. Text should meet a minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background. Run your palette through a contrast checker before it goes into production — fixing it later is painful.

Keyboard navigation. Every interactive element should be reachable and usable with a keyboard alone. Tab through your product right now. If you get stuck, your users will too.

Alt text on images. Decorative images should have empty alt attributes. Meaningful images should have concise, descriptive alt text. This one takes minutes and makes a real difference for screen reader users.

The 80/20 of Semantic HTML

Most accessibility issues stem from div soup — interactive elements built with divs instead of native HTML. Use buttons for buttons, links for navigation, and form labels that are properly associated with their inputs. Native HTML is accessible by default.

Testing Without Specialist Tools

You don't need a full accessibility audit to catch the obvious issues. Try these:

• Turn on your OS screen reader and navigate through your product

• Disable your mouse and use only the keyboard for five minutes

• Use a browser extension like Axe or Lighthouse to get an automated baseline

Build It Into Your Process

The best accessibility teams don't add an accessibility review at the end — they make it part of definition of done. A short checklist on every design handoff goes further than a quarterly audit.