Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways? · brennan.day

🌻 Welcome to brennan.day! I respect your decision to not use JavaScript. You can read here for more information about what functionality is disabled and why.

Skip to main content

Graphic from NIH 11th Annual Disability Employment Awareness Program poster, 'Awareness and Action' from the History of Medicine (IHM), 1993. | Flickr (edited by the Author)

I've done a lot of tinkering and attempts at optimization on https://Brennan.day, and one of the foundational principles of the project was to be accessible from the start—making an accommodating website was not going to be an afterthought.

But what does that mean, exactly? I think it's good to actually write a blog post explaining that. An accessible starting point, if you will. Web accessibility (sometimes shortened to a11y[1]) is "the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible." There is a wide range to consider here: visual impairments, hearing impairments, mobility impairments, cognitive impairments, and more.

I'll start off, though, with some of the most important things that I think beginner web developers don't hear enough.

Designing for Disability Means Designing for Everyone

Anytime you develop with accessibility in mind, or improve a product for someone with a disability, you're actually improving it for everyone. This is called the curb cut effect.

In the 1970s, disability activists in Berkeley, California, pushed for small ramps to be cut into sidewalk corners so that wheelchair users could move through their communities without being stopped every block by a four-inch drop. The ramps got built. And then? It turned out the curb cut helped everyone: Parents with hefty strollers. Delivery workers hauling hand trucks. Skateboarders. Tourists dragging rolling luggage through unfamiliar cities. A solution designed for a specific need became universal.

The same thing happens in digital design:

Closed captions were created for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, and they're wonderful for anyone watching video on a crowded commute, in a noisy café, or late at night beside a sleeping partner.

High-contrast text, originally designed to help people with low vision, makes your website more readable in bright sunlight.

Voice controls, built for people with motor impairments, became the hands-free layer underneath Siri and smart speakers. Text-to-speech turned out to be useful for driving, for cooking, for holding a baby while you need both hands and still want to hear what's next.

The reason we audit our websites for how much contrast there is between text and background, or add ARIA landmarks, or ensure there's full keyboard navigation access, isn't to satisfy a checklist and be done with it. It isn't compliance theatre. It's about making it more readable for someone on a cracked phone screen, for someone borrowing a laptop without a mouse, for someone who just got their pupils dilated at the optometrist and is trying to read something waiting for the blur to clear.

This is about understanding how to make your words and work better understood by everyone, not just the able-bodied population. This is about meeting people where they are, no matter what.

Really, this is about connecting to humanity.

If you want to better understand disability and people with disabilities, I would recommend subscribing to Chris Ulmer's channel, Special Books for Special Kids. In addition to being one of the greatest YouTube channels around, SBSK is dedicated to "creating a more inclusive world" by interviewing people with disabilities from around the world "of all ages and diagnoses".

Disability Is More Normal Than You Think

If you wear glasses, you have impaired vision. That's a disability, and that's okay! The reason we rarely think of it that way is because the support infrastructure is widespread and robust. There's an optometrist in every city and frames at every drugstore for nine dollars.

Think about the accommodations that haven't been normalized yet. In web design, that's screens that can't be navigated without a mouse, or forms with no label text. The video with no captions. The button that's a styled with no keyboard event, invisible to screen readers.

These are day-to-day encounters on the web for millions of people. Low-grade friction that compounds over every session, every tab, every attempt to participate in digital life.

According to the WHO, an estimated 1.3 billion people, roughly 1 in 6 of us, experience significant disability. In the United States, the CDC puts the figure at around 26% of adults. This is a growing number driven by aging populations and the rise of noncommunicable disease.

These are your readers, your users, the people who found your site from a search or a shared link and arrived hoping to read something you made.

Disability is also not always permanent, either. A broken arm means weeks without reliable fine motor control....