The Cheapest Accessibility Wins

Ranked by effort, not by importance

Most accessibility guidance is organised by the standard, which is correct and produces a list nobody starts.

Organised by effort, the same material becomes a sequence: an hour, a day, a week, each producing a visible improvement.

This is not a suggestion that the cheap things matter most. It is a recognition that a business which does the first hour will usually do the first day, and one that is handed a fifty-item audit will do none of it.

The five most common failures are covered separately and in more depth. This is about order, and about the items that sit outside that five.

The first hour

Four things, none of which requires touching content, and all of which apply site-wide.

• Declare the page language, one attribute in the template.
• Give every page a distinct title, describing the page.
• Fix link text that says click here or read more.
• Add a skip link to jump past the navigation.

Each takes minutes and each helps somebody every single visit.

Why those four

The language attribute tells a screen reader which pronunciation rules to use. Without it, English content may be read with the wrong accent and rules, which ranges from odd to incomprehensible. It is one line and it affects everything.

Page titles are what a screen reader announces on arrival and what appears in a list of open tabs. A site where every page is titled with the business name gives somebody no idea where they have landed.

Link text matters because many people navigate by pulling up a list of the links on a page. A list reading read more, read more, read more is useless, and the fix is rewriting the sentence so the descriptive words carry the link.

A skip link lets somebody using a keyboard jump past thirty navigation items to the content, rather than tabbing through them on every page. It can be visually hidden until focused, so nothing changes for anybody else.

The first day

The three that account for most of what an automated tool reports.

Contrast, corrected by darkening body text and adding a darker variant of any brand colour used for small elements. Usually two values in a stylesheet.

Form labels, attached properly and visible above each field, on every form including the search box.

Image descriptions, written for every meaningful image, with decorative ones marked as empty so they are skipped.

The third is the only one that scales with the size of your site, and it is the one worth limiting: do the images on your top twenty pages and leave the archive.

The first week

Two areas that need testing rather than editing, which is why they come later.

Keyboard operation: tab through every page type and confirm you can see where you are, reach everything, open menus, complete forms, and never get trapped. Restore the focus outline if a theme removed it, and fix the order if it jumps around.

Documents: check which PDFs are scanned images, rebuild the ones people actually use as pages, and add format and size to every document link.

Both take longer because they involve going through the site rather than changing a setting, and both find problems the automated tools do not report.

A worked example

An accountancy practice received an audit listing sixty-three items and did nothing with it for eight months, which is the usual outcome.

Reorganised by effort, the first hour covered four items affecting every page. The first day covered another thirty-one, because contrast and labels were repeated failures rather than distinct ones.

That left twenty-eight, of which nineteen were image descriptions on an archive nobody visited.

They did the hour on a Friday afternoon and the day the following week.

A repeat audit reported nine items rather than sixty-three, and the remaining nine were genuinely more work.

Nothing had changed about the difficulty of the original list. It had been presented in a form that made starting impossible.

Group failures before counting them

The insight that makes an audit manageable, and it applies to every report of this kind.

Automated tools report per element, so one grey colour used across a site appears as forty failures, and one missing label pattern in a template appears as one per page.

Sorting the report by the rule that failed, rather than reading it top to bottom, usually collapses sixty items into six problems.

Do that before estimating anything, because the estimate produced from the raw count is wrong by an order of magnitude and is the reason these reports get shelved.

What is genuinely expensive

Worth naming so the cheap list is not mistaken for the whole subject.

Complex interactive components: custom dropdowns, date pickers, sliders, and anything built with scripts rather than standard elements. These are real work and frequently the right answer is to replace the component rather than fix it.

Data tables with merged cells and multiple header levels, which require structure that most content editors cannot add.

Video captioning at volume, which is time rather than difficulty.

And anything requiring the design to change, where a colour scheme or layout decision is the underlying cause.

Those belong in a plan with a budget. Nothing on the hour or day lists does.

Stop the backlog rebuilding

The step that decides whether this holds.

Whoever adds content needs to know four things: write a description for every image, use headings in order, do not put text inside images, and describe links properly.

That is a short page and twenty minutes of explanation, and it prevents the site drifting back over the following year.

Without it, a business fixes forty image descriptions and adds sixty more over the next twelve months, which is how sites end up being audited repeatedly with the same findings.

The counter-case

Ordering by effort has a real weakness, and it should be said.

The cheapest fixes are not always the ones affecting the most people. A missing skip link is a minor inconvenience; a booking form that cannot be completed is a customer who cannot buy from you.

If you already know of a specific barrier, particularly one somebody has reported, fix that first regardless of where it sits on an effort list.

The sequence here is for organisations with no information and no momentum, which is most of them. Where you do have information, it beats any general ordering.

The sequence

1. Group the audit by rule before counting anything.
2. Hour one: language, titles, link text, skip link.
3. Day one: contrast, form labels, image descriptions.
4. Week one: keyboard testing and documents.
5. Fix anything reported by a real person, first.
6. Brief whoever adds content, in twenty minutes.
7. Plan the expensive items separately, with a budget.

Step one is what turns an unusable report into a plan, and it takes ten minutes.

The five failures themselves are covered in fixing the five most common failures.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.