WCAG

What the guidelines actually ask for

WCAG is a technical standard. It is not a law, and it is not a plugin. It describes how a page has to be built so it works for someone using a screen reader, someone who cannot use a mouse, someone with low vision, someone with a tremor, someone watching a video with the sound off.

The requirements are less exotic than the acronym suggests. Text needs enough contrast against its background to be readable. Every image that carries meaning needs alt text. Form fields need labels that stay visible after you start typing. Anything you can do with a mouse has to work with a keyboard alone, in a sensible order, with a visible outline showing where you are. Video needs captions. Nothing important is signaled by color alone, so a required field cannot simply turn red.

A quick way to feel it: put your mouse away and try to reach your own contact form using only the Tab key. If you cannot tell where you are on the page, neither can anyone who navigates that way every day.

Conformance comes in three levels, A, AA, and AAA, in rising order of strictness. AA is the level most accessibility requests and standards documents point at. AAA is rarely applied to a whole site, because parts of it are impractical for ordinary business content.

Why a trade business should care

Two reasons. One is decent, one is uncomfortable.

The decent one: these are your customers. Homeowners with failing eyesight hire contractors constantly, and a phone number rendered inside a low contrast image is unreachable for them. So is a quote form whose labels vanish the moment you start typing.

The uncomfortable one: website accessibility complaints and demand letters are a real category of mail, and being small and local does not exempt a business from receiving one. Whether the law applies to your site is a legal question for a lawyer rather than a web company, and ADA website compliance is where that side of it sits. WCAG is what the technical half of the argument almost always points to.

Then there is cost. Contrast, labels, heading order, and keyboard access are decisions made in the markup, which makes them cheap while a site is being built and tedious to retrofit later. That is why an accessibility review belongs inside the build, alongside the performance and security checks in how we build, rather than in a widget installed after launch.

Where accessibility and search overlap

Accessible markup and search friendly markup are largely the same markup. Headings in real order. Link text that describes where the link goes. Alt text on images that carry meaning. Forms with labels attached to their fields. A screen reader and a crawler both read structure instead of looking at a picture of the page, so work done for one tends to serve the other.

It overlaps with user experience as well. Larger tap targets, readable type, and clear error messages are not special accommodations. They are easier for everyone, including the customer standing in a parking lot with one bar of signal.