How to create an accessible website for everyone (with 28+ tips)

You’ve spent months perfecting your website’s design, fine-tuning the user experience, and crafting compelling content. But if countless users with disabilities can’t even navigate or read your site, all that effort falls disappointingly short. 

Improving accessibility makes an incredible difference, breaking down the digital divide that excludes millions of users with visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive differences. And it doesn’t require starting from scratch or sacrificing a beautiful site. 

In this guide, you learn how to address different user needs and walk away with more than 28 practical tips you can implement immediately to make your website more accessible today.

Key insights

• Remember that many disabilities are invisible, such as color blindness or dyslexia. Accessibility improvements often help users whose needs aren’t immediately apparent. 

• Make accessibility a team effort. Content creators, web developers, and UX/UI designers each have their own roles to play. The most accessible websites rely on the expertise of all three! 

• Test with real users. Keyboard accessibility testing and user feedback reveal how your site really performs for people with disabilities. Contentsquare’s User Tests make this easy to do at scale.

• Start with small changes that make a big impact, like ensuring the correct color contrast, using semantic HTML structure, and writing descriptive alt text for images. These changes alone can dramatically improve accessibility.

A 6-step guide to improve digital accessibility for all your users

Over one billion people worldwide have some form of disability that affects their ability to use the internet, making accessible website design essential. Whether a user has color blindness or paralysis, you want to ensure they feel comfortable when using your website.

At Contentsquare, we believe digital experiences should be a powerful force for good, not just business growth. That’s why we make digital accessibility central to our mission and impact, from making our own platform accessible to helping organizations understand and optimize how users experience their websites.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to create a well-rounded site that addresses specific accessibility needs while improving usability across the board.

1. Test how real users interact with your site

If you want to make your site easier to use for everyone, you have to learn how people currently use it. Not how you think they’ll use it — but how they actually click, tab, or scroll through content to accomplish their objectives. 

While a good place to start is using free automated digital accessibility tools, like WAVE Accessibility Evaluation Tool by WebAIM or Siteimprove Accessibility Checker, the gold standard is user testing. 

"The most effective way to assess the impact of a product or service on people with disabilities remains to conduct user testing, including these audiences,” says Natacha Madeuf, Accessibility Expert at the Contentsquare Foundation. 

“Not only do they highlight accessibility issues, but also concerns about comprehension, ergonomics, or UX that, once corrected, improve the experience for all users."

Use tools like Contentsquare’s User Tests to make it simpler to test at scale

1. Easily recruit people from our pool of 200,000 participants

2. Ask them to complete specific tasks on your website—no moderator required. Our platform records their journeys as well as their answers to follow-up questions at the end of the session.

3. Analyze their responses to understand how well your product meets their individual needs and expectations

It’s easy as 1, 2, 3—literally! Once you have an idea of the changes needed based on the input of users with visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive needs, you can move on to the next steps.

Contentsquare’s User Tests tool helps you understand whether real people can actually use your site

2. Add visual support

Visual impairments, ranging from complete blindness to cataracts, affect over 2.2 billion people worldwide. While not all of these people need website assistance, many do, relying on technology like screen readers, keyboard navigation, or display adjustments to access content. 

Here are a few key practices to support visual accessibility for your users:

• Ensure proper contrast ratios. Use a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for text under 18.5 points, and 3:1 for larger or bold text. This helps users with low vision read your content clearly. Contrast Checker by WebAIM is a great free tool to use.

• Structure your content with clear headings. Screen readers rely on this to help users understand how sections relate to each other and to skip to the information they need. Use H1 for the title, H2s for headings of main sections, and H3s for any subheadings. The free HeadingsMap tool for Chrome or Firefox can help you generate a document outline with headings for any webpage.

• Write alternative text for images. Think about how you would describe the image to a friend, and then write meaningful descriptions of 1–2 sentences that convey this information. 

• Make links stand out. Underline or bold your links instead of relying on the standard blue color to make them pop. This helps color-blind users identify clickable elements fast.

3. Provide cognitive assistance

Cognitive impairments—including autism, dementia, dyslexia, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—impact how people process the information on your website. It often helps to provide predictable layouts that reduce cognitive load on the reader.

Here are some best practices that improve cognitive accessibility: 

• Use simple, readable fonts. Choose sans-serif fonts like Arial or Tahoma in at least 14-point size. Users with dyslexia or attention challenges may find other fonts difficult to read or distracting. 

• Emphasize text intentionally. Use bold to highlight important information—but don’t overdo it. Avoid using all caps or italics, which makes text harder to scan for people with visual processing difficulties. 

• Use lots of white space. Keep paragraphs short and increase the margin size to help readers focus on your content.

• Include supportive visuals. Use visuals to break up large sections of text and provide a break for the reader. If these visuals provide a simple diagram or illustration to help them understand the content, that’s even better! 

🤔 Did you know? There’s a free tool to personalize reading experiences. 

The Contentsquare Foundation—our organization dedicated to building a more accessible internet—developed Readapt, an open-source solution that lets anyone create a personalized reading profile for digital content.

Whether someone has dyslexia or visual impairments—or just wants to customize their reading experience—Readapt adapts text formatting, spacing, colors, and fonts for them. 

Available as a Chrome extension, Word add-in, or code package for developers, Readapt makes digital content more accessible while giving users complete control over how they consume information.

4. Improve auditory accessibility

More than 430 million people worldwide experience disabling hearing loss, and millions more experience conditions like tinnitus, a ringing in the ears. But the need for sound-free content delivery goes beyond users with auditory impairments. Many people watch videos without sound, either because they are in public places or simply prefer it. 

Here are a few best practices for supporting auditory accessibility:

• Add captions and subtitles to all video content. Include accurate text that’s in sync with the audio. Caption any sound effects in addition to the dialogue, allowing users to experience the video more fully.

• Offer transcripts for audio content. Provide the text for podcasts, webinars, and other video content to allow users to read it at their own pace.

• Provide visual notifications. Pair audio alerts with visuals to cue users who are deaf or hard of hearing to important information. For example, instead of just a chime, use pop-ups, icons, or banners to reassure users that their form was submitted successfully or remind them of a time-sensitive task.

• Consider sign language interpretation. This step takes a bit more work up front, but it can be well worth it for high-impact content like product launches or webinars. By interpreting content into American Sign Language (ASL) or other sign languages, you help viewers follow along more easily and show your commitment to inclusivity.

5. Support physical needs 

Physical impairments, like paralysis or tremors, affect hundreds of thousands of people around the world. For many users with physical disabilities like these, the internet provides a lifeline for essential tasks like staying connected to friends and family or shopping for groceries or clothing.

Here are a few best practices to support physical accessibility: 

• Ensure full keyboard navigation. Some people can’t use a mouse. Ensure they can access every interactive element of your site using only the Tab, Shift + Tab, Enter, and Space keys by testing it yourself.

• Keep organization simple. Use clear, concise menus that follow a logical hierarchy. For example, you might organize items from general to specific or group similar pages together. This helps users better understand your site structure and prevents them from having to tab through dozens of links to get to the one they need.

• Make focus indicators visible. Focus indicators are visuals that bring attention to your website’s interactive elements. While these are provided automatically by web browsers, you can update your CSS to make them even more visually apparent with stronger contrast or color changes.

• Limit pop-ups and intrusive ads. These add friction for any user, but become even more stressful and problematic for users with physical limitations.

6. Collect data and improve

Inclusivity is a journey—not a box to check and move on. Once you’ve taken steps to improve your site for users with various disabilities, strive for continuous improvement.

Validate that the changes you’ve made have indeed improved the user experience. (We walk the talk here at Contentsquare: see our digital accessibility statement for the last time we tested our site and the limitations we’re still working to improve.)

Beyond more digital accessibility testing (see Step 1), here are some ways to see how your site meets user needs:

• Launch questionnaires with our Surveys tool. Start from a template, or ask our AI assistant to create an accessibility survey for you. 

• Get more context on what users tell you by using the Session Replay tool to capture sessions that contain feedback or survey responses. See exactly what the customer experienced from their clicks to swipes. (Or get an AI-generated one-click summary of multiple sessions to find issues even faster.)

• Use our Frustration Score feature to find and fix specific signs of user frustration—like rage clicks or excessive hovering. 

Contentsquare’s Session Replays let you watch real sessions and build empathy for your users’ digital experiences

💡Pro tip: track the accessibility of your website with digital experience analytics. Contentsquare’s accessibility segments help you identify visitors who use adaptive behaviors like keyboard navigation, page zoom, or text highlighting. This reveals not just how many users have accessibility needs, but also where they encounter friction on your site. 

Use this data to prioritize the accessibility improvements that will have the biggest impact on conversion and user experience. It’s one thing to make your site accessible—it’s another to measure whether those changes actually work for real users.

Analyze user behavior according to accessibility needs with Contentsquare’s accessibility segments feature

Bonus accessibility tips for every team 

Creating a truly accessible website requires collaboration across your entire team. Each role—from content creation to development to design—has the opportunity to build accessibility into their daily work.

Whether you’re writing copy or code or designing interfaces, these tips help you contribute to a more inclusive digital experience for your users.

Content contributors

If this is your role, you already know that words have power. From the moment someone lands on your page, the content and copy you create guide their journey, ensuring they can access the content they need. 

By making a few small changes to how you create or structure your content, you dramatically improve the experience of your users. 

• Structure your content in a predictable way. While surprises are sometimes fun (🎁), they can be confusing or distracting for readers with accessibility needs.

• Choose a thoughtful on-page title. It should reflect your content and make sense out of context to avoid confusion.

• Use clear language. You’ve probably heard the adage, ‘Clear is better than clever,’ and accessibility is just another reason why. The easier your readers can comprehend your content, the better their experience. 

Developers

The code you write forms the invisible foundation that makes accessibility possible—no pressure, right? While users may never see your markup or functions, your technical choices determine whether assistive devices can make sense of your site. 

• Apply semantic HTML tags correctly. Use elements like <button> or <nav> instead of generic divs so screen readers can understand your content’s purpose and structure better. 

• Clearly label every form field, using proper <label> tags. Screen readers use this information to announce what the field is for—like ‘email address’ or ‘phone number’—so users know what information to enter.

• Zoom in. You want to ensure that all information remains visible and understandable for readers with visual limitations. 

UX/UI designers

As a user experience (UX) or user interface (UI) designer, your decisions shape how users interact with and move through a website. Whether you’re creating wireframes or interface components, you need to create a digital experience that feels like a breath of fresh air. 🌬️

• Avoid applying multiple actions on a single element. For example, one action when a user clicks left, and one action when they click right. 

• Use clicks instead of hover interactions. Hovering is often inaccessible for keyboard-only users and people using screen readers or touch devices like tablets.

• Avoid carousels, which are hard to make accessible. Plus, research shows they don’t actually drive leads or conversions. 

👉 Want even more tips to improve the user experience for everyone? Get our free digital accessibility handbook.

Put website accessibility into practice 

While complete digital accessibility won’t happen overnight, even small improvements can make a big difference, fast. If each person who develops, designs, or adds content to your website focuses on a few best practices, your users will notice the difference—and you’ll be contributing to a more inclusive web for all.

FAQs about how to improve digital accessibility