For many people, interacting with the internet means looking at a screen. And whether you’re using a mouse or tapping on a screen, the the web is designed for you. But those interactions don’t work for everyone. And today, where knowledge, research and diverse perspectives are critical to a fair world, we must ensure everybody can access the web. So let’s talk about the importance of digital accessibility, and what it means for us a developers.
Reframing Accessibility
It feels like accessible design has gained a quietly reputation: one of ‘extra work’ or a barrier to building quickly. But that’s assuming what we’re already building isn’t accessible, which isn’t quite true. For example, we:
- Make sure information is visible and readable;
- Design things to be simple so understanding it is easy;
- Allow actions through a mouse or touch screen, like clicking a link to navigate;
- Give visual feedback on errors, for example when submitting a form.
All of that is accessible design: we are making deliberate design decisions about who we include or exclude from accessing our information. So really, when we talk about accessibility, we really need to ask:
What qualities are we requiring our users to have to interact with what we build? And who are we excluding from accessing it?
The Very Real Effects
Today, so many businesses and services assume you can access the web or use mobile applications. So online spaces have become the default places to:
- Manage finances;
- Search product details and availability;
- Interact with businesses and services;
- Find educational resources like videos or books;
- Read the news;
- Communicate with friends, colleagues and peers.
The list goes on. What it boils down to is that digital communication is the de-facto standard. And with many of these kinds of services having limited analogue equivalents, the importance of digital accessibility vastly increases.
Web Technologies Are Your Friend
The biggest barrier to designing for everyone is that there are a lot of everyones — eight billion, in-fact. Personally ensuring every one of them has equal access to your platform is an impossible task. Which is why the strategy is to approach it differently.
The web is the closest thing we have to digital ubiquity. And its sheer prevalence is thanks to being jam-packed with accessible abstractions. Instead of custom-building everything you need, we can take full advantage of the vast array of available web technologies so what we build can be interpreted by virtually anyone.
Instead of thinking about “writing for a display” or “writing for a screen reader”, we need to think of it as “writing for the web”. The question shouldn’t be what you want your page to look like, but what you want it to be. And by making that one change, you’ll quickly find yourself writing more expressive markup (and realise how many things are basically just unordered lists).
The basics come down to choosing which tag to use, which attributes to set, and ensuring you update them if your content changes. This step alone can eliminate an entire class of poorly accessible documents — like the mythical creature known as the “div-button”.
But if it’s that easy, why doesn’t everyone already do it?
The Accessibility Gap
Learning web development can feel like a trap. Once you understand how elements and attributes work, it can feel like you’ve exhausted what HTML has to offer. And because of that, it can feel there’s no difference between adding an `active` class on a nav link vs. setting aria-current=”page” and styling things that way.
This is the accessibility gap. Where you can build something for visual users, but the semantics of what you’re writing don’t come through for anybody else.
And with so many educational resources only focused on building for a visual audience, it’s no wonder this gap exists. Their goal was never to build for everyone, and mentions of accessibility are often relegated to footnotes or missing entirely. And even today, high-quality accessible teaching materials aren’t always easy to find.
At Laracon AU 2025, Charlie Morris presented a talk titled “Markup Matters”. He talked about what accessibility is, the work he does, and how making small, reasonable adjustments to your code can have big impacts.
And critically, he showed how easy it is to get it right. If you have the knowledge, that is.
Moving Forward
There’s no such thing as accessibility overnight. But there’s no understating the importance of improving digital accessibility. While there are standards — like the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — they are enormous, and learning it all isn’t quick nor easy. But in the spirit of Laracon AU 2025, we should all aspire to level up. And the accessibility of the digital documents we create has so much room to improve.
As web designers and developers, we must be more conscious about who can and cannot access what we build: being the barrier between people and knowledge is a significant responsibility that we far too often neglect. And with AI churning out code at lightning speeds, it’s no longer enough for us to personally craft quality sites, but also to flag when AI does so poorly.
The good news is the barrier is knowledge. It’s now up to us to close the gap.