Accessibility

What is a11y?

Accessibility (shortened to a11y the “11” represents the eleven letters between the “a” and the “y”) is the practice of designing and building websites so that everyone can use them, regardless of disability or circumstance. This includes people who are blind or low-vision and rely on screen readers, people with motor impairments who navigate by keyboard rather than mouse, people with cognitive or learning differences who benefit from clear language and consistent layouts, and people with hearing loss who need captions on audio content. In web development, a11y is guided primarily by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a set of internationally recognized standards published by the W3C that define measurable criteria like minimum color contrast ratios, required alt text on images, and keyboard focusability of interactive elements across three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Beyond legal compliance (many countries mandate WCAG AA for public-facing sites), building accessibly is simply good engineering: semantic HTML, logical structure, and clear visual hierarchy make sites faster, more maintainable, and better for everyone including users on slow connections, older devices, or just a phone screen in bright sunlight.