Is accessibility a legal requirement?
There is a legal and reputational side, and it is growing, but the stronger reason is practical: people who cannot use the product leave, and they rarely tell you why.
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Accessibility is not the polish, it is the product
Accessibility belongs at the start of a digital project, because for many of the people you want to reach it decides whether they can use the product at all. Checked at the end, it becomes a few patches and a ticked box, and the people it fails leave without telling you. Built in from the beginning, it is mostly a set of choices about contrast, structure, labels and clarity, which costs little and makes the product easier for everyone to use.
Who does a late accessibility check shut out?
People who could not use what you built, and you usually never find out, because they simply left. Poor colour contrast shuts out people with limited vision. A form that only works with a mouse shuts out anyone using a keyboard or assistive technology. Cluttered navigation and dense pages defeat people with cognitive differences, and anyone who is stressed, tired or in a hurry, which is most people some of the time.
Taken together that is a large share of any audience, and getting it wrong turns away the people the project was built for.
When does accessibility become the whole job?
When the audience's circumstances are hard. I built a dementia support platform where the users were often older, frequently stressed, sometimes living with cognitive decline, and regularly reading on a phone in a hospital corridor at the worst moment of their week. If they could not use it easily, nothing else the project achieved mattered. So it was built to recognised accessibility standards from the start, with contrast tested against the guidelines rather than judged by eye, and navigation kept deliberately simple.
Most projects are less stark, but the principle holds: the harder your audience's circumstances, the more accessibility moves from compliance to the centre of the work.
What does building it in from the start involve?
Making the accessible choices while the product is being designed, instead of running a check once it is nearly signed off. The usual pattern is the reverse: the site is designed, built and close to launch, someone remembers the accessibility check, a few things get patched, a box gets ticked and everyone moves on.
Done early, it is a set of sensible decisions about contrast, structure, labels and clarity, and those same decisions make the product clearer for everyone. Done late, it is expensive rework, or a pass on an audit that still fails real people. There is a legal and reputational side to this as well, and it is growing.
Related evidence: DementiaNet: building a dementia support platform people actually use. Earlier in this journey: What boards should ask before approving an AI project.
Questions people ask
Does accessible design only help disabled users?
No. Clear contrast, structure, labels and navigation help anyone who is stressed, tired or in a hurry, which is most people some of the time.
Not sure where to start?
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