This minority recruits everyone

Web accessibility gets its share of “no need for that here” reactions: “We do photography, we don't have blind users” or “We're a sports centre, no disabled people here”. You know who else doesn't get many wheelchair users? A restaurant at the top of a flight of stairs. That doesn’t mean a ramp is pointless, it just means the stairs are keeping people out.

A quick definition first: accessibility, often abbreviated as a11y (a + 11 letters + y) is designing websites and apps so that people with disabilities (visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive) can use them: voice navigation for sight issues, keyboard-only input because a mouse hurts for some hands… The list of ways bodies and minds have to adapt is endless.

And, contrary to most minorities, disability is the one minority you can suddenly get drafted into: temporarily (broken arm, migraine, eye surgery, a screaming child leaving you one-handed…) or permanently.

If you build for accessibility now, you're building for the person you're statistically likely to become later.

And, if you need the stick rather than the carrot: the European accessibility act came into force in June 2025 and added a lot more sites than public sector ones to its a11y obligations.

In any case, accessible design isn't a tax on the able-bodied, it's a subsidy for literally everyone. There’s this thing called the curb cut effect: you know that dropped pavement border built for wheelchairs? It’s used by every parent with a pram, every delivery worker with a cart, and every traveller with a rolling suitcase. Accessible design has a way of turning into good design for everyone.

Hertz paid for that lesson: “We rent cars, no disabled customers here”, until they redesigned their site without accessibility in mind and got buried in complaints from grandparents who couldn’t book a car for their grandchildren’s move to college anymore.

We're all only temporarily able-bodied, and the web works better when built with that in mind. It's also nearly free if you bake it in from the start rather than trying to bolt it on later.

Colin

PS: Test your website. Automated tests aren’t perfect, but they’re a start.