You've made the business case. Leadership is on board. The budget's approved. Now comes the part where most accessibility initiatives either take flight or fall flat: actual implementation.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: knowing accessibility matters and actually making it happen are two very different things. But here's the good news: you don't need to rebuild everything from scratch, and you don't need unlimited resources. What you need is a smart strategy and the discipline to execute it.
(This is Part 2 of our accessibility series. Missed Part 1? Read about The ROI of Accessibility first.)
Stop Trying to Fix Everything at Once
The biggest mistake organizations make is attempting to remediate their entire digital ecosystem simultaneously. It's overwhelming, expensive, and it usually ends with burnout and incomplete work.
Instead, adopt the crawl-walk-run approach. Start with your highest-impact areas (typically your conversion paths, critical user journeys, and most-visited pages). If users can't complete a purchase, submit a form, or access your core services, that's where you begin.
Research from WebAIM consistently shows that the same issues appear across the web. In their analysis of the top one million websites, they found that the majority of accessibility failures fall into just six categories. Even better? Most of these are quick and relatively easy to fix.
The Quick Wins That Build Momentum
Before you tackle complex widgets and intricate interactions, start with accessibility quick wins. These are changes that deliver immediate impact without requiring massive development effort:
Color Contrast: Low contrast text appears on 83.9% of home pages tested, according to WebAIM. Fixing contrast issues often requires nothing more than adjusting hex codes in your style sheets. There are free tools that make this a five-minute fix per component.
Alt Text for Images: Missing alternative text for images is one of the most common accessibility errors. Writing descriptive alt text for your images costs nothing but a few moments of thoughtful description. The key is being descriptive and purposeful. "Image" is not a meaningful description, and leaving it blank is even worse!
Form Labels: Ensure every input field has a properly associated label. This isn't just good for screen reader users. It improves usability for everyone. Using the for attribute on labels connected to input id attributes creates the proper relationship that assistive technologies need.
Descriptive Link Text: Replace vague phrases like "click here" and "learn more" with descriptive text that tells users where the link goes. Screen reader users often navigate by jumping from link to link, so "Learn more about our accessibility services" is infinitely more useful than just "Learn more."
Document Language: Specify your page language in the HTML tag (e.g., <html lang="en">). This one-line addition helps screen readers pronounce content correctly and improves translation accuracy.
Keyboard Navigation: Test every interactive element on your site using only your keyboard. Can users tab through forms, open menus, and submit information without a mouse? If not, fix keyboard focus states and tab order.
These quick wins provide immediate accessibility improvements while building team confidence and stakeholder buy-in for larger initiatives. A few of these will even improve your SEO exposure!
Integrate Accessibility into Your Existing Workflow
Accessibility shouldn't be a separate project. It needs to become part of how you build. Organizations that rely on audits alone often end up patching the same issues repeatedly. A better approach is to build accessibility into the workflow from the beginning.
Here's how to make that happen:
Design Phase: Designers should annotate mockups with accessibility requirements like heading structure, color contrast ratios, focus states, and ARIA labels where needed. WCAG 2.2 includes nine new success criteria, including enhanced focus appearance, ensuring actions can be completed without drag gestures, and minimum tap target sizes of 24x24 CSS pixels. Build these requirements into your design systems from the start.
Development Phase: Developers should use semantic HTML as their foundation. Using proper HTML elements like header, nav, main, article, and footer creates a logical, predictable structure that assistive technologies can interpret. Leverage component libraries that prioritize accessibility. Frameworks like Material UI and Vuetify are working to provide accessible components out of the box, according to resources on accessible development practices.
Testing Phase: Don't wait until launch to test accessibility. Integrate automated scanning tools like Axe DevTools into your continuous integration pipeline. These tools catch common issues early, but remember, automated testing today only catches a fraction of accessibility issues. Manual testing with keyboard navigation and screen readers is essential.
QA Phase: Include accessibility testing in your standard quality assurance process. Create accessibility test cases alongside your functional test cases. Better yet, conduct usability testing with people who actually use assistive technologies! Research from Fable emphasizes that measuring the user experiences of people with disabilities provides invaluable insights that automated tools can't capture. Treat accessibility bugs like any other bug. Prioritize them and resolve them as part of your sprint planning.
Monitor Production: When you plug all your code together and deploy it, you can introduce accessibility issues. Have a mechanism in place to monitor your production environment and a plan to address these issues
Budget-Friendly Implementation Strategies
Accessibility doesn't have to break the bank. Here are cost-effective approaches:
Leverage Existing Tools: Many development frameworks and design systems already include accessible components. Use them. Don't reinvent the wheel by building custom components from scratch when accessible alternatives exist.
Train Your Team: Investment in training yields long-term dividends. When your designers, developers, and content creators understand accessibility principles, they build more accessible products by default. Organizations that track accessibility training completion rates see measurable improvements in the accessibility of their outputs.
Fix Forward, Not Backward: For new features and pages, build accessibility in from the beginning. Organizations that integrate accessibility from the start spend approximately 67% less on compliance than those who retrofit accessibility after launch. Prevention is vastly cheaper than remediation.
Start with Standards: Use established patterns and components rather than creating custom interactions. The more you deviate from standard HTML behaviors, the more accessibility work you create. Standard patterns are not only more accessible, they're also more familiar to users.
Start Today, Not Tomorrow
Here's your action plan for the next 30 days:
Week 1: Run an automated accessibility scan on your five most important pages. Identify and fix the quick wins.
Week 2: Conduct keyboard-only testing on your critical user journeys. Document where keyboard users get stuck and fix navigation issues.
Week 3: Review and update your design and development processes to include accessibility checkpoints. Add accessibility requirements to your definition of done.
Week 4: Schedule accessibility training for your team. Start with a foundation course that covers WCAG basics and your organization's specific standards.
The companies that succeed at accessibility don't try to do everything at once. They pick strategic starting points, build momentum with visible wins, and gradually embed accessibility into their culture and processes. They recognize that accessibility is a journey, not a destination. And they take the first step.
Coming up in Part 3: We'll explore how to measure the success of your accessibility initiatives, prove ROI to stakeholders, and build a culture of continuous improvement.
What's your biggest accessibility implementation challenge? Are you struggling with team buy-in, technical complexity, or something else entirely? Share your experience in the comments. Take the LinkedIn Poll here!
Let's get out there and make it real!
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