The essential guide to digital accessibility

Imagine visiting a restaurant where some customers are given chopsticks to eat soup, while everyone else gets spoons. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yet that’s essentially what happens when websites aren’t accessible—millions of users receive the digital equivalent of chopsticks they can’t use. (You better believe that they’ll take their business elsewhere next time!)

When you prioritize digital accessibility, you’re doing the right thing. But you’re also making a smart business decision. When you design for everyone, you create better experiences for all users and tap into a market worth over $13 trillion globally. 

In this guide, you learn everything you need to know to build truly inclusive digital experiences, including what accessibility means, why it matters for your company, and how to get started without getting overwhelmed.

Key insights

• Take an iterative approach to accessibility. You don’t need to solve everything at once. Audit the current state of your site and products, and prioritize a few high-impact improvements. Then, build accessibility requirements into your ongoing web design and development processes. 

• Find the best path to buy-in. Digital accessibility matters for dozens of reasons. What motivates your user experience (UX) team to make changes might be different than what drives your C-suite. 

• Remember that everyone benefits from accessibility. Digital accessibility practices bring clarity and ease of use to people with or without disabilities. And when your business improves experiences for all users, you’ll feel good and see better engagement across the board.

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility means ensuring that everyone can use your websites, apps, and digital tools, regardless of whether they have a disability. It’s about giving people with impairments the same access to online services—in the same amount of time and with similar effort—as those without disabilities. 

This means looking at your website, products, and electronic documents through the lens of someone who has visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive differences. Depending on what areas of friction you find, you might simplify navigation for users with screen readers or use larger font sizes for those with poor vision. 

When you look at it that way, accessible design isn’t necessarily difficult—it just requires empathy and a little extra consideration. 

💡 Pro tip: empathy starts with listening to your users and understanding their needs from their point of view. Use Contentsquare’s free Surveys tool to connect with your users, asking them questions about how well your site works for them and how you might improve it. 

Contentsquare’s AI-powered survey generator can create an accessibility survey for you in seconds. Once the results start rolling in, AI also helps you analyze the answers—so you can get to work making website improvements.

Accessibility questions generated by Contentsquare’s AI-powered survey generator

Making the case for digital accessibility

We can do more online today than ever before. From catching up with friends to ordering food, the internet has changed the way we live and interact as human beings. 

But for all of its incredible magic, it also comes with some big challenges—including digital accessibility issues. An estimated 1.3 billion people experience a significant disability. And that means, without accessible web pages, your site could prevent a sizeable segment of the world’s population from enjoying digital experiences as everyone else. 

The stakes are higher than ever. And that’s why digital accessibility has evolved into a moral, commercial, and legal necessity.

📣We’ve got big dreams here at Contentsquare. We imagine a world where digital experiences are a driving force for businesses—and for good. 

As a purpose-driven company, we’re dedicated to making a social and environmental difference—including creating experiences that are accessible, inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable. Read more about the Contentsquare Impact here.

Whether you’re building a business case or just trying to expand your knowledge about the issue, here are 3 compelling reasons to prioritize accessibility now:

1. It’s the right thing to do

Digital accessibility is one thing we should take personally. Approximately 70–80% of disabilities are invisible. The colleague who seems to navigate websites just fine might actually struggle with dyslexia, making it hard to digest and understand dense text blocks. And your neighbor with Parkinson’s disease might have motor symptoms that make small clickable areas frustrating to use. 

When we build digital experiences that work for everyone, we acknowledge that there’s no ‘typical’ way to interact with technology. Every person deserves equal access to information, services, and opportunities online. 

Good design is inclusive design—and allowing for exclusion, whether intentional or not, has real human consequences.

👉 Did you know? To further our dreams of a more inclusive internet, we created the Contentsquare Foundation in 2021—and it’s served as an advocacy tank, educational resource, and innovation hub ever since. 

Want to join us in our mission to break down accessibility barriers? Learn more about our projects and take our free digital accessibility course.

2. It’s the law

The arguments for accessibility extend further still. As the world wakes up to the importance of digital accessibility for all, governments worldwide are implementing web accessibility standards across their online content. 

That means you have to comply with regulations to stay competitive—including these: 

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international gold standard for digital accessibility. They define three levels of compliance (A, AA, and AAA—with AAA being the highest). While not legally binding, WCAG guidelines are the building blocks for many accessibility laws worldwide. 

• The European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires EU member states to implement accessibility legislation in key sectors. As of June 28, 2025, private sector services, such as banking, ecommerce, transportation, and media, must comply with accessibility standards—or face penalties of €50,000 or more in countries like France.

• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people living with disabilities, and US courts increasingly apply this to digital experiences. States like California, New York, and Texas have also introduced specific digital accessibility laws. (Learn more about the accessibility laws in your state.)

In addition to facing penalties and fees, companies that don’t comply with accessibility standards face expensive and brand-tarnishing lawsuits. According to UsableNet, there were over 4,000 digital accessibility lawsuits in 2024 alone that involved websites, mobile apps, and video content. 

3. It’s smart business

The business case for accessibility is impossible to ignore. The number of people with disabilities is roughly equivalent to the population of China (1.4 billion)—a huge market that you’re potentially losing if you don’t make digital content accessible. 

Accessibility matters to people—and that’s reflected in solid data. Inclusive organizations report 28% more revenue and twice as much net income compared to less inclusive competitors. 

And here’s the thing: accessible design doesn’t just help people with disabilities—it benefits everyone. Clear navigation and readable fonts make sites easier to use for people on mobile devices, elderly users, anyone with a slow internet connection, or even just someone trying to multitask. 

And when customers can use your site easily, they’re more likely to come back, make more purchases, and tell a friend about your business.

Interflora: accessibility delivers in a big way 

For international flower delivery network Interflora, accessibility is about much more than ticking boxes on a legal checklist. 

As Camille Peney, Senior UX Designer at Interflora, puts it, “The goal is not just to be compliant, but to deliver an exceptional user experience for everyone.”

What started as a values-driven decision to pursue accessibility quickly gained momentum. With the European Accessibility Act on the horizon, they also saw a clear business case for inclusivity: better search engine optimization (SEO), broader reach, and more conversions. 

By starting with an accessibility audit and analyzing their digital experiences with Contentsquare, they’ve now made changes in their design, development, and quality assurance (QA) processes—and seen real results. Among users with accessibility needs, they’ve seen a 30% increase in conversions and a 45% higher average basket. 

3 benefits of digital accessibility for your business

Making your digital experiences accessible is about doing the right thing—but also about seeing incredible business outcomes. 

Here are 3 ways accessibility impacts your bottom line:

1. Improved user experience

Features like a clear heading structure and accurate labels on form fields don’t just help screen reader users—they help everyone understand and use your site more effectively. 

And when you remove friction points and make your site easier and more intuitive to navigate, you naturally improve user satisfaction and reduce bounce rates. 

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s accessibility segments to identify visitors with access needs on your website. Group users who rely on adaptive behaviors like keyboard navigation, page zoom, or text highlighting. Then, apply these segments across tools like Session Replay and Heatmaps to detect navigation and readability issues. 

Pair this feature with our Impact Quantification tool to determine how accessibility improvements affect conversion and revenue, and prioritize your UX fixes accordingly. 

Use Contentsquare’s accessibility segments to find and fix issues for your users who require adaptive behaviors to access your website features

2. Increased website use

When people feel comfortable using your website, they naturally want to stay longer, explore more pages, and return more frequently. And that triggers a positive ripple effect: better engagement metrics signal to Google that your site is high quality, driving more organic traffic to your site. 

It’s a fact: accessible sites rank higher in search engines. One study found that organic traffic grew by 23% as a site’s accessibility compliance score increased. 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s open-source solution Readapt.ai to provide users with a customizable reading experience on websites like yours.

Over 700 million people worldwide have dyslexia, which can make reading digital content challenging. Readapt lets them fine-tune fonts, color contrast, and spacing to match their specific reading needs.

Use Readapt to customize online text to make it easier to read

3. Better brand reputation

Want to stand out from the pack? If you demonstrate a genuine commitment to inclusion, people will take notice. And that’s important: one study found that 82% of shoppers want a brand with values that align with their own.

Accessibility initiatives show customers and employees alike that you value diversity and want to put in real effort to serve them. The result is stronger brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth marketing—making both customer retention and acquisition easier.

Start your accessibility journey with confidence 

Digital accessibility is the foundation of truly inclusive digital experiences. Whether you’re moved to action by a sense of justice or increased revenue, your journey starts by taking a clear next step—learning more about what to do and making strategic improvements over time. 

Every accessible experience you create makes the web a little more inclusive for everyone. The next chapters in this guide show you how to get started: 

• How to build an accessible website for everyone: get practical tips and a step-by-step guide to creating inclusive web experiences from the ground up

• Digital accessibility tools: discover the essential tools and technologies that make accessibility testing and implementation easier

• Digital accessibility testing: pick up new testing methods to ensure your accessibility efforts deliver real results

FAQs about digital accessibility