1. Why Accessibility Matters
Roughly 1 in 6 people lives with a disability. When your content is inaccessible, you are unintentionally excluding a large part of the community you serve — and sometimes members of your own team.
Digital accessibility is the practice of making digital content — posts, images, videos, documents, and websites — usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities. The same effort that helps a blind user with a screen reader also helps someone watching a video on a silent bus, or an older volunteer reading on a small phone in bright sunlight.
Who benefits
People experience barriers in different ways. Understanding them makes the solutions obvious:
| Group | Example barrier | What removes the barrier |
|---|---|---|
| Blind / low vision | Cannot see an image or a video | Alt text, audio description, high contrast, large readable text |
| Deaf / hard of hearing | Cannot hear speech in a video or podcast | Captions and transcripts |
| Motor disabilities | Cannot use a mouse precisely | Keyboard-friendly, large tap targets, no tiny controls |
| Cognitive / learning | Long, complex text is hard to follow | Plain language, headings, short sentences, clear structure |
| Older adults | Small text, low contrast, fast video | Bigger text, strong contrast, captions, simple layouts |
| Situational (everyone) | Bright sun, noisy room, slow phone | All of the above — accessibility helps everyone |
Why it matters for your organization
- Inclusion & rights — accessible content treats people with disabilities as equal members of the public and of the workforce.
- Reach — you stop excluding ~16% of your audience, plus their families and friends.
- Your own staff — employees with disabilities must be able to read, use, and work on the documents and systems their jobs depend on.
- Law & policy — many countries and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) require accessible information.
- Partners & funders — institutions and donors increasingly expect accessible communications, services, and reporting.
- Visibility & reputation — captions, alt text, and clear headings improve reach and signal professionalism and respect.
Designing for each group: do’s and don’ts
The same content can help one person and block another. Use this as a quick per-group reference, alongside the WCAG actions in the chapters that follow.
| Group | Do | Don’t |
|---|---|---|
| On the autistic spectrum | Plain language; simple, consistent layouts; descriptive buttons (e.g. “Attach files”). | Idioms or figures of speech; walls of text; vague buttons (“Click here”). |
| Screen-reader users (blind) | Describe images and add transcripts for video; descriptive links and headings; a linear order that works by keyboard. | Put information only in an image or video; rely on size or placement for structure; bare “click here” links. |
| Low vision | Strong contrast and a readable size; combine colour, shape and text; keep each action beside its context. | Low contrast or tiny text; meaning by colour alone; key information buried in downloads. |
| Dyslexia | Start-align text (left in English, right in Arabic); support text with images; let users change contrast and offer audio/video versions. | Italics, underlines or ALL CAPS; heavy walls of text; forcing people to remember things from earlier pages. |
| Physical / motor | Large clickable targets with space around them; design for keyboard or speech; keep mobile and touch in mind. | Demand precision (tiny targets); short time-outs; lots of typing and scrolling. |
| Deaf / hard of hearing | Plain language; captions or subtitles plus transcripts; offer a preferred way to make contact. | Audio or video only; complex words or idioms; making the phone the only way to reach you. |
| Anxiety | Give enough time; say what happens next (“We’ve sent you an email”); let people review answers before submitting. | Rush users or set impractical time limits; leave people unsure of next steps or consequences; make help hard to find. |