What accessibility standards should modern websites meet?

Modern websites should meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure they’re usable by everyone, regardless of ability. WCAG 2.1 is the current international standard, with three levels of conformance, A, AA, and AAA, where A represents basic accessibility, and AAA represents the highest level. Most organizations aim for Level AA compliance, which has become not just a best practice but increasingly a legal requirement as well.

Why Accessibility Matters

Beyond being the right thing to do, accessibility compliance protects your organization from legal risk while expanding your potential audience. Roughly one in four adults in the U.S. lives with a disability, and globally, that number increases to more than 15% of the population. Accessibility also benefits your SEO performance, as many best practices for images, metadata, and headings align with established accessibility guidelines.

Key Design Considerations

Your website should accommodate users with visual, motor, hearing, cognitive, and neural sensitivity differences. From a visual design perspective, this means implementing high-contrast color schemes between text and backgrounds, using appropriate font sizes (12-point or 16-pixel minimum for body text), providing adequate spacing between sections, and giving users control over autoplay features and animations.

Navigation is equally critical. Your site should support keyboard navigation with logical tab order and visual indicators, integrate seamlessly with screen readers through semantic HTML and ARIA labels, and offer motion sensitivity options to reduce animations for users who need them.

Development Best Practices

On the technical side, developers should properly tag heading hierarchies (H1, H2, H3) to create a clear information structure, enable text resizing up to 200% without breaking layouts, configure all functionality for voice control devices, include descriptive alt text for all images, and provide synchronized captions and transcripts for video and audio content.

Ongoing Commitment

Accessibility isn’t a one-time checklist, it requires ongoing attention as you add new content and features. Tools like WAVE and WebAIM’s Contrast Checker can help you verify compliance, and accessibility testing should be part of your regular website maintenance. When you partner with a web design agency, ensure they build accessibility into the project from the start rather than treating it as an afterthought.