Web Accessibility: Why should we care?

Have you ever felt excluded?

Imagine this situation: you need to complete an urgent task on a website. The confirmation button just vanishes into a sea of near-identical colors, and you can’t tell which one is which. Or maybe the site is packed with animations that yank your attention in every direction, killing your focus. Or worse: you rely on a screen reader, and the system won’t read the page elements the way it should.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

This is the daily reality for millions of people. They try to use essential services, government websites, major e-commerce platforms, and run into this constantly.

What is web accessibility, anyway?

Web accessibility, put simply, means building websites and applications that anyone can use, whatever their physical or cognitive limitations, whatever their connection speed, whatever device happens to be in their hand.

Seems obvious, right? After all, the web was born to be universal. As Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the World Wide Web) once said: “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

But between tight deadlines and pressure to ship fast, it’s easy to lose sight of that.

Who benefits from accessibility?

When I first thought about writing on accessibility, the image that came to mind was blind people using screen readers. The field is wider than that.

• Sight: from total blindness to different types of color blindness. I used to think color blindness just meant mixing up red and green.
• Hearing: from complete deafness to partial loss. A buddy of mine has partial hearing loss and constantly complains about videos without captions.
• Motor: hand tremors, people who can’t use a mouse, folks who navigate only with a keyboard or a specialized device.
• Cognitive: dyslexia, ADHD, autism. Some layouts and writing styles make a page harder to follow.
• Temporary: a broken arm, lost glasses, a baby in one arm, a laptop in bright sun.

Any of us can acquire a permanent disability at some point. An accident, aging, an illness. Disability isn’t something that only happens to other people. Building accessible websites is also an investment in our own future.

The reality in numbers

Globally. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), 15% of the world’s population (over 1 billion people) lives with some form of disability.

In Brazil. According to the 2022 Census by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), we have 14.4 million people with disabilities (7.3% of the population).

That’s roughly the population of Belgium without decent access to digital services.

Why is web accessibility important?

Inclusion and dignity. An inaccessible website excludes people from essential services. You can’t pay a bill online. You miss a job because the application form doesn’t work with a screen reader. You can’t reach a government service on your own.

Business. That’s a large market to shut out. A lot of the same fixes help everyone else too. Captions help in noisy places. High contrast helps in bright sun. Keyboard navigation is faster once you know the shortcuts.

Legal. In Brazil, it’s Chapter II of the LBI (Brazilian Inclusion Law, Law 13.146/2015) that addresses digital accessibility. In the US, meanwhile, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) underpins lawsuits against inaccessible websites. And those lawsuits don’t come cheap.

How’s web accessibility today?

Being honest? Pretty awful. The WebAIM Million’s 2025 report analyzes the million most visited websites:

• 94.8% have automatically detectable failures
• Average of 51 errors per page
• Most common problems: low contrast (79.1%), images without alt text (55.5%), links without descriptions (45.4%)

And this only counts automatically detectable problems!

A practical example

As a developer, I’ve seen code like this far too often:

<!-- The lazy way -->
<div class="button" onclick="submitForm()">Submit</div>

<!-- The right way -->
<button type="submit">Submit</button>

Visually, they’re twins. But there’s a gulf between them in accessibility: the <div> doesn’t receive keyboard focus, screen readers don’t recognize it as a button, and Enter or Space simply do nothing.

The <button> tag comes with all these features built-in. It’s literally less work to do it right!

See the difference in practice. Try navigating with just Tab and Enter.

What’s coming up

In upcoming articles, I’ll explore the needs of different audiences:

1. Blindness: how blind people navigate the web
2. Low vision and color blindness: beyond contrast
3. Motor disabilities: keyboard navigation and response time
4. Deafness: truly inclusive multimedia content
5. Cognitive challenges: simplicity without impoverishing content

Each post will have practical examples you can use in a project.

Acknowledgment

This series was born after I read “Practical Web Accessibility”, by Ashley Firth. I recommend it to anyone who works with the web. His practical approach was the push I needed to share what I learned, filtered through a Brazilian lens.

Conclusion

For millions of people, web accessibility is a necessity. Those of us who build the web are the ones who can make the pages usable.

Using the right HTML element already solves a lot of it.

References

• WHO: Disability and Health
• IBGE: 2022 Census: Brazil has 14.4 million people with disabilities
• WebAIM: The WebAIM Million 2025
• W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Ashley Firth: “Practical Web Accessibility” (2nd edition)
• Brazilian Inclusion Law: Law 13.146/2015