A Practical Guide to Core Web Vitals

Making a website accessible does not require a full redesign; the biggest wins usually come from fixing a small set of common, easily overlooked oversights. Many accessibility issues come from simple oversights: images without alt text, colour contrast too low to read comfortably, and forms that cannot be navigated by keyboard alone.

Fixing these does not require a full redesign; semantic HTML, proper heading structure, and testing with a screen reader catch most of the common problems.

We include a basic accessibility pass on every website project, since it improves usability for all visitors, not only those using assistive technology.

Missing or unhelpful alt text is one of the most common issues we find in audits, and it is also one of the cheapest to fix: every meaningful image needs a concise description of what it conveys, while purely decorative images should be explicitly marked so screen readers skip over them rather than reading out unnecessary noise.

Colour contrast problems often come from design choices that look fine to a designer on a calibrated monitor but fail for users with low vision or in bright outdoor lighting. Running key pages through an automated contrast checker catches most of these issues in minutes, and the fix is usually a small palette adjustment rather than a redesign.

Keyboard navigation is the check that reveals the most structural problems, since it exposes custom dropdowns, modals, and interactive widgets that were built with only mouse and touch interaction in mind. A user who cannot see the screen, or who cannot use a mouse due to a motor impairment, needs to be able to reach and operate every interactive element using only the keyboard.

Semantic HTML, using actual heading tags, list elements, and button elements rather than generic styled divs, is what makes all of this work efficiently for assistive technology, since screen readers rely on this structure to let users jump between sections and understand what each element does. We treat this as a baseline development practice rather than a separate accessibility task bolted on at the end, which is both cheaper and produces a more robust result.