Accessibility is not an optional enhancement or a niche concern. It is a fundamental aspect of good web design that affects far more people than most businesses realize. According to the World Health Organization, over one billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. That includes visual impairments, motor difficulties, cognitive differences, and temporary conditions like a broken arm or an eye infection. When your website is not accessible, you are not just failing a compliance standard. You are turning away potential customers, readers, and users who want to engage with your content but cannot.
At Kosmoweb, accessibility is built into our design process from the beginning, not bolted on at the end. We have seen firsthand how addressing accessibility improves the experience for all users, not just those with disabilities. The principles that make a site accessible, such as clear navigation, readable text, and logical structure, are the same principles that make a site pleasant to use for everyone.
Keep Navigation Simple
Navigation is the backbone of any website experience. If users cannot find their way around your site efficiently, nothing else matters. For users who rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technologies, a poorly structured navigation system is not just inconvenient. It can make the site effectively unusable.
Start with a clear, consistent menu structure. Your primary navigation should appear in the same location on every page. Use descriptive link text that tells users where they will go. "Learn about our services" is far more useful than "Click here." Avoid dropdown menus that require precise mouse hovering, or if you must use them, ensure they are fully operable via keyboard.
We redesigned the navigation for a municipal government website that had accumulated over 400 pages with no clear hierarchy. Citizens were struggling to find essential services like permit applications and waste collection schedules. We restructured the navigation into five top-level categories based on user research, added a prominent search function, and implemented breadcrumb trails on every interior page. Support calls asking "how do I find X on your website" dropped by over 40% in the first quarter after launch.
Skip navigation links are another essential feature. These are hidden links at the top of a page that allow keyboard users to jump directly to the main content, bypassing the header and navigation that repeat on every page. They are invisible to mouse users but invaluable to anyone navigating with a keyboard or screen reader.
Use Alt Text for Images
Every image on your website should have an alt attribute. For informational images, the alt text should describe what the image conveys. For decorative images that add no content value, the alt attribute should be present but empty (alt=""), which tells screen readers to skip it rather than awkwardly announcing "image" with no context.
Writing good alt text is a skill. It should be concise but descriptive enough to convey the image's purpose. "Photo" is useless. "Team photo" is slightly better. "Five Kosmoweb team members collaborating around a whiteboard in our Prague office" is informative. The goal is to give a non-sighted user the same understanding a sighted user gets from the image.
For an e-commerce client selling handcrafted ceramics, we wrote alt text for over 300 product images. Rather than generic descriptions like "blue mug," we wrote text like "Handmade stoneware mug in deep ocean blue with a speckled glaze finish, 350ml capacity." This not only served accessibility purposes but also improved the site's image search rankings, since search engines rely on alt text to understand image content. Organic image search traffic increased by 19% over the following six months.
Keyboard-Friendly Sites
Not everyone uses a mouse. People with motor impairments, power users, and anyone with a temporary injury may navigate entirely via keyboard. Your website must be fully operable using only the Tab key (to move between interactive elements), Enter (to activate links and buttons), and arrow keys (for menus and certain widgets).
The most critical element of keyboard accessibility is visible focus indicators. When a user tabs to a link or button, there must be a clear visual indication of which element is currently focused. The default browser outline works, but many designers remove it for aesthetic reasons without providing an alternative. This is one of the most common accessibility failures we encounter in audits.
We conducted an accessibility audit for an online education platform and found that their custom video player was entirely mouse-dependent. Keyboard users could not play, pause, adjust volume, or toggle captions. We rebuilt the player controls with full keyboard support and ARIA labels, making the learning content accessible to students who could not use a mouse. One student who used a mouth-operated joystick wrote to the client specifically to thank them for the improvement.
Test your site yourself: put your mouse aside and try to complete your most common user tasks using only a keyboard. If you get stuck or cannot tell where the focus is, your keyboard users are experiencing the same frustration.
Make Text Readable
Readability encompasses font choice, size, spacing, contrast, and line length. Each of these factors affects how easily users can consume your content, and for users with visual impairments, dyslexia, or cognitive differences, they can mean the difference between a usable site and an unusable one.
Use a base font size of at least 16 pixels for body text. Ensure a line height of 1.5 or greater for paragraph text. Keep line lengths between 50 and 75 characters for optimal readability. Choose typefaces that distinguish clearly between similar characters like lowercase L, uppercase I, and the number 1.
Color contrast is governed by WCAG guidelines: a minimum ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. We use automated contrast checking tools during development, but we also manually verify contrast in real-world conditions. A color combination that passes automated testing can still be difficult to read on a low-quality screen or in bright sunlight.
For a legal services website, we increased the body font size from 14px to 17px, changed the text color from a light gray (#999) to a dark charcoal (#333), and widened the content column from 900px to 720px to shorten line lengths. The client initially resisted the changes, feeling they made the site look "less modern." After launch, average page reading time increased by 35%, and the client reported that older clients specifically commented on how much easier the site was to read.
Test on Different Browsers
Accessibility is not just about design and code. It is also about ensuring your site works consistently across the diverse range of browsers, devices, and assistive technologies your users actually employ. A site that is accessible in Chrome on a desktop may behave very differently in Safari with VoiceOver, Firefox with NVDA, or Edge on a tablet.
We test every project on at least four browser and assistive technology combinations. Our standard testing matrix includes Chrome with desktop screen readers, Safari with VoiceOver on both macOS and iOS, Firefox with NVDA on Windows, and Edge with the built-in Narrator. We also test with browser zoom at 200% to ensure layouts remain functional for users who enlarge text.
During cross-browser testing for a banking client, we discovered that their loan calculator widget broke entirely in Safari when VoiceOver was active. The issue was a JavaScript focus management bug that only manifested with screen reader interaction. It would never have been caught by visual testing alone. After fixing it, the calculator became one of the most-used features among the bank's visually impaired customers, a user group they had previously been unable to serve online.
Automated accessibility testing tools like axe, Lighthouse, and WAVE are valuable for catching common issues, but they typically identify only 30-40% of accessibility problems. Manual testing with assistive technologies is irreplaceable.
Wrap-Up
Accessibility is not a feature you add. It is a quality you build in. Simple navigation, descriptive alt text, keyboard operability, readable text, and thorough cross-browser testing form the baseline of an accessible website. They are not the ceiling, but they are the floor, and meeting them puts you ahead of a surprising number of websites on the internet today.
At Kosmoweb, we approach accessibility as a dimension of quality that benefits every user. The curb cut effect, named after the sidewalk ramps originally designed for wheelchair users that turned out to help parents with strollers, delivery workers with carts, and travelers with luggage, applies directly to web design. When you design for the edges of human ability, you improve the experience for everyone in the middle. That is not charity. It is good design, and it is good business.