WCAG compliance, explained without the jargon

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Here is WCAG compliance without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

AA is the level most organisations are held to. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

Compliance is a floor, not a finish line. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Where to go from here

Some sectors have a legal obligation, not a preference. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about WCAG compliance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Compliance is a floor, not a finish line — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.