Guide 10: What is web accessibility (WCAG)? Designing inclusive digital products

Digital accessibility: Why inclusive design is a business imperative

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes | By the Imagineer Technical Team

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

Web accessibility ensures there are no technical or design barriers preventing people from using your website. This includes creating interfaces that accommodate people with physical disabilities, situational limits, and technological restrictions.
  • The Risk: Digital accessibility is a strict legal mandate that protects you from discrimination lawsuits and brand damage.
  • The Growth: It significantly expands your total addressable market (TAM) by making your product usable for an estimated 1.3 billion people with disabilities.
  • The Standard: The WCAG framework ensures platforms are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR).

The risk of locking users out

gnoring web accessibility isn't just an ethical failure; it's a massive, looming legal risk that actively locks out millions of paying customers from your platform every single day.

Moving beyond the "nice to have" mindset

Many startups view accessibility as a secondary feature—a nice-to-have addition to bolt on later once the core product is built and funded. This is a fundamentally flawed approach. It creates serious legal risks and structurally locks out a massive segment of the global market from giving you money.

  • The legal mandate

    Digital accessibility is no longer optional. Under various strict global laws (like the DDA in Australia or the ADA in the United States), if your digital product is not fully accessible to people with disabilities, you are wide open to significant legal action, costly discrimination lawsuits, and severe brand damage.

  • Expanding your total addressable market (TAM)

    If your app is not coded to be compatible with screen readers, or relies heavily on low-contrast colours that are hard to read, you are actively blocking paying customers from using your product. You are intentionally shrinking your own market size.

  • The SEO and usability bonus

    The exact same engineering practices that make a site accessible (clear heading structures, semantic HTML tags, descriptive alt text on images) are exactly the practices that Answer Engines and Google search algorithms use to read and rank your site. Accessible design inherently drives excellent SEO performance.
The Industry Reality
According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. Despite this, the WebAIM Million report regularly finds that over 96% of homepages fail basic WCAG compliance. Accessible design represents a massive, untapped commercial opportunity for platforms that get it right.

The curb cut effect

In physical architecture, curb cuts on sidewalks were originally designed strictly for wheelchairs. However, they ended up massively benefiting people with strollers, delivery drivers with carts, and travellers with heavy luggage. The exact same principle applies to digital design.

Adding closed captions for the hearing impaired benefits everyday users watching videos on a loud, crowded train. High-contrast text helps the visually impaired, but also helps a user trying to read your app outside in bright sunlight. Inclusive design ultimately benefits everyone and creates a superior product.

Understanding WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

The international, legal standard for accessibility is WCAG. It is organised around four core principles, easily remembered by the engineering acronym POUR:

  • P - Perceivable

    Users must be able to perceive the information being presented. For example, providing deep text alternatives (alt-text) for images so assistive screen readers can describe them accurately to visually impaired users.

  • O - Operable

    Users must be able to operate the interface. This means ensuring a complex SaaS platform can be navigated entirely by hitting the 'Tab' key on a keyboard, without ever requiring a mouse or complex touch gestures.

  • U - Understandable

    Information and the operation of the user interface must be completely logical and understandable. For example, providing clear error messages that tell the user exactly how to fix a form input, rather than just highlighting the box in red.

  • R - Robust

    Content must be coded robustly enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including older browsers and specific assistive technologies.

Essential accessibility glossary

  • WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

    The internationally recognised, deeply technical standards that explicitly outline how to make web content accessible. We currently build to align with the modern WCAG 2.1 and emerging 2.2 standards, ensuring your platform is legally resilient for the future.

  • Screen reader

    Assistive software (like JAWS, NVDA, or Apple's VoiceOver) used heavily by visually impaired individuals. These tools programmatically read the raw HTML text and structural code displayed on the screen aloud, or render it on a connected braille display.

  • ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)

    A set of specific HTML attributes that define ways to make highly dynamic web content and complex JavaScript applications more accessible to screen readers when standard HTML tags aren't enough. However, the first rule of inclusive engineering is: "No ARIA is far better than bad ARIA."

  • Contrast ratio

    The strict mathematical difference in luminance between a text colour and its background colour. The WCAG AA standard dictates a minimum ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text. This ensures critical interface elements remain readable by users with low vision, age-related vision degradation, or colour blindness.

Frequently asked questions

  • Can't we just install an automated accessibility widget or overlay and be compliant?

    No, and attempting to do so is a massive legal risk. While automated overlay tools (which sit as a floating widget on your site) claim to make sites accessible with a single line of code, they are widely condemned by the disabled community.

    They frequently fail to fix underlying structural code issues, actively confuse existing screen readers, and legally do not protect you from liability lawsuits. True accessibility must be baked directly into the semantic HTML code and visual design from the start.

  • What specific level of WCAG compliance should a business actually aim for?

    WCAG defines three levels of conformance: A (the lowest, absolute bare minimum), AA, and AAA (the highest and most restrictive). For most commercial platforms, e-commerce sites, and B2B SaaS products, WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the globally accepted standard target.

    Achieving AAA across an entire highly dynamic, interactive platform is often technically impossible and usually reserved for highly specialised government sites. Level AA provides the perfect balance of commercial viability and deep legal protection.

  • Can we successfully retrofit true accessibility into an existing, live application?

    Yes, an existing application can absolutely be audited and updated to meet WCAG standards over time. However, it requires deep, structural codebase changes, a total overhaul of the colour palette, and UI redesigns.

    We conduct intensive Accessibility Audits to identify these flaws, providing developers with a prioritised backlog to fix the most glaring issues first. While it can be done retroactively, it is always significantly more cost-effective to incorporate inclusive design practices during the initial UX/UI discovery phases.

Suggested further reading

  • W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) documentation.
  • Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes.

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