Accessibility is Not Optional: Expanding Your Reach and Avoiding Lawsuits

Imagine building a physical store and putting a giant step at the entrance, preventing anyone with a wheelchair from entering. You would be sued, and you would lose customers.

Yet, millions of websites do exactly this every day. They block users with disabilities through poor design and coding choices.

Web Accessibility (often abbreviated as a11y) is the practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.

In 2025, accessibility is not a "nice-to-have" feature. It is a legal requirement and a massive business opportunity.

1. The Legal Landscape: The Clock is Ticking

Governments are cracking down.

• USA: The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is increasingly applied to websites. Thousands of lawsuits are filed every year against businesses with inaccessible sites.
• Europe: The European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into full force in June 2025. It mandates that e-commerce sites, banking services, and more must be accessible.

Non-compliance is not just risky; it's becoming illegal.

2. The Business Case: The Purple Pound

Forget the law for a second. Let's talk money. 15% of the global population has some form of disability. In the UK alone, the "Purple Pound" (the spending power of disabled households) is estimated at £274 billion per year.

If your site is inaccessible, you are leaving this money on the table. You are effectively telling 15% of the market to go shop at your competitor's site (which might be accessible).

3. Common Failures (and How We Fix Them)

Most accessibility failures are easy to fix if you know what to look for.

• Low Contrast: Grey text on a white background might look "sleek" to a designer, but it's unreadable for someone with low vision.
  • Fix: We ensure all text meets WCAG AA contrast ratios.
• Missing Alt Text: A blind user uses a Screen Reader. If your image doesn't have "Alt Text," the screen reader just says "Image 123.jpg."
  • Fix: We describe every image in code.
• Mouse-Only Navigation: Many users (including those with motor disabilities) cannot use a mouse. They use the Tab key on their keyboard.
  • Fix: We test every site to ensure it is fully navigable using only a keyboard.

4. The SEO Bonus

Here is a secret: Google is a blind user. Google's crawler bot cannot "see" your images or "watch" your videos. It relies on the code structure, the alt text, and the semantic headings to understand your content.

When you optimize your site for accessibility (using proper HTML5 tags, transcripts for videos, clear headings), you are inadvertently optimizing it for SEO. Accessible sites rank higher. Period.

5. Situational Disabilities: It Helps Everyone

Accessibility features often help people without permanent disabilities.

• Captions on Video: Essential for the deaf, but also used by someone watching a video on a noisy train without headphones.
• High Contrast: Essential for low vision, but also helps someone looking at their phone screen in bright sunlight.
• Large Touch Targets: Essential for motor control, but also helps someone with "fat fingers" or a shaky hand.

By designing for the margins, we improve the experience for the center.

Conclusion: Ethics and Excellence

At Dantastic, we believe the web should be open to everyone. We build accessibility into our process from the wireframe stage, not as an afterthought.

An accessible website is a sign of a quality brand. It shows you care about your customers—all of them.