Advent 2025 - 24 days of accessibility
You've probably encountered this scenario: you land on a form with a single text box. No label, just a placeholder that says "Search..." which disappears the moment you click. Or maybe you've seen a password field that rejected your entry, only to discover afterward that it required at least 12 characters, one uppercase letter, one number, and a special symbol - requirements that were mentioned nowhere near the field itself.
These frustrating experiences aren't just bad design - they're accessibility barriers. And they affect everyone, not just people using assistive technology.
You click "Add to Cart" and a little notification pops up: "Item added!" You submit a form and see "Thank you, your message has been sent." You start typing in a search box and results appear below as you type. These instant feedback messages are everywhere on modern websites - but are they accessible to everyone?
For sighted users, these visual cues are obvious. But for someone using a screen reader, these dynamic updates can be completely invisible unless they're coded properly. The page content changed, but their screen reader said nothing about it.
Picture this: you're reading an article on your phone, or maybe you're at your desktop after a long day of staring at screens. The text is just a bit too small, making your eyes work harder than they should. You zoom in... and suddenly half the content disappears off the side of the screen, or worse - text overlaps and becomes completely unreadable.
Have you ever tried to fill out a form on a website using only your keyboard? Maybe your mouse died, or you're working on a laptop with a finicky trackpad. You hit Tab to move from field to field, and suddenly you're jumping all over the page, or worse - you have no idea which field you're actually in.
This is the daily reality for many keyboard-only users, including people who use screen readers, people with motor disabilities who rely on keyboard navigation, and power users who simply prefer keyboard shortcuts for efficiency.
So much of accessibility is about making your content clear and understandable to a wide range of users. Structuring your content can really help here. Adding headings for each section of text particularly helps with assistive technologies like screen readers. Headers can help organize your content into groups, and show the relationships within your content.
If you have a lot of content, finding something specific can be a challenge for your users. For accessibility, this guideline was created to support people that have different ways of thinking or finding things -- but I find this useful in all sorts of contexts. Strong navigation implies structure on your site, structure that can help people find what they are after.
One of the most common issues we run into making websites accessible is contrast -- making sure the difference between the color and brightness of the text against the background is enough that it's clearly readable.
Blue text on a dark background can be very difficult to read -- but it's not just brightness. Red-green color-blindness affects around 8% of males around the world. Take a screen out into bright sunlight and try to read text that's similar brightness to its background, and you can start to understand that contrast issues affect everyone.
