The real cost of ignoring semantic HTML

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Nobody bills you for neglecting semantic HTML. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• The right element gives you behaviour and accessibility for free
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

A div with a click handler is not a button. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Making it stick

Semantic markup is the cheapest accessibility work available. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How to tell if yours is fine

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about semantic HTML before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Semantic markup is the cheapest accessibility work available — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.