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Accessibility is a build gate, not a retrofit
The failures an audit finds late — unreachable controls, invisible focus, unlabelled buttons, text that fails contrast — are all consequences of decisions made early. Treated as a gate the build has to pass, they cost almost nothing; treated as a phase, they cost a rebuild.
The cheapest test takes two minutes
Put the mouse away and press Tab through the page. Watch where the focus ring goes and whether you can see it.
That single pass finds the majority of real failures: controls you cannot reach, a focus outline someone removed for looking untidy, a modal that traps you, a skip link that goes nowhere, an order that jumps from the header to the footer and back. None of it needs a tool.
Contrast is a decision, not a defect
Contrast failures happen at the moment a palette is chosen, which is why they are so expensive later — by then the colour is in the brand, the components and the marketing. Check the pairs you intend to use against the threshold before they become the design, and the problem never exists.
Name things by what they do
An icon button with no accessible name is announced as “button”. A link that says “read more” is announced as “read more”, which is useless in a list of nine of them. Neither is difficult to fix while writing the component and both are tedious to find afterwards.
Make it a gate
Every one of these is checkable automatically or in two minutes by hand. Put them in the same place as the rest of your build checks, so a regression fails the build rather than waiting for an audit. Accessibility stops being a project the moment it becomes a condition of shipping.
Article FAQs
Still have questions?The short answers.
Is an automated checker enough?
It catches roughly the mechanical third: missing alt text, contrast failures, unlabelled fields. It cannot tell you whether the focus order makes sense or whether a custom control announces what it does. Run it, then use a keyboard.
What does WCAG AA require in practice?
For most sites: sufficient contrast on text and controls, everything operable by keyboard with visible focus, meaningful names on every interactive element, content that survives 200% zoom, and no information carried by colour alone.
