A short guide to WCAG compliance

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Everything we would tell a client about WCAG compliance in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The reason this keeps coming up

AA is the level most organisations are held to. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The practical version

Compliance is a floor, not a finish line. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to watch for

Some sectors have a legal obligation, not a preference. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. 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.