What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility is the practice of designing and building websites, mobile apps, user interfaces, and other digital products so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with them.

It covers steps you can take to make your digital products and presences accessible to people with visual, auditory, cognitive, and physical disabilities, and it's typically measured against international standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In practice, that means ensuring that accessibility features like screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, sufficient colour contrast, and clear form labels are built into your digital development practices.

At a glance

Why is digital accessibility important?

More than a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization. They need to access digital spaces to search for jobs, manage healthcare, access government services, and stay in touch with family.

When a website or app isn't accessible, these users can be locked out of things everyone else takes for granted, from filling out a job application to booking a doctor's appointment, reading the news, or renewing a prescription.

Digital accessibility is also a legal requirement in many countries, enforced through laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the European Accessibility Act, and the UK's Equality Act. Organizations that ignore it face genuine compliance risk, including complaints and accessibility lawsuits.

Missing alt text, poor color contrast, unlabeled form fields, and content that doesn't work with a screen reader are common, well-documented barriers that show up frequently in digital accessibility lawsuits and accessibility audits.

Beyond the legal necessity, accessible design is good for business, and it tends to help brands produce a better user interface and a better experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities.

For one, it expands your market reach, as a meaningful share of your potential audience has some kind of disability. It can also strengthen brand reputation by signaling that your organization takes users of diverse abilities seriously.

Also, because many accessibility fixes overlap with SEO fundamentals, like clean heading structure and descriptive text, making your site accessible often helps it perform better in search engines too.

Digital accessibility best practices

Digital accessibility should be an ongoing practice woven into web design and development, rather than a one-time checklist. Most of it follows WCAG's four core principles, often shortened to POUR: content needs to be:

• Perceivable – Actually readable for all users
• Operable – All users must be able to interact with elements
• Understandable – The pages must be clear to all users (from an accessibility standpoint)
• Robust – The content must work across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies such as screen readers.

Semantic HTML is your foundation. Use a proper <button> or <label> element instead of a styled <div>, and you get keyboard support and screen reader compatibility automatically.

Where semantic HTML alone can't describe something more complex, like a custom dropdown or a live status update, reach for ARIA attributes instead, which add roles, states, and properties that assistive technologies and other user agents can read.

Run digital accessibility testing to catch issues on your site. Automated scanners like Marker.io's Website Monitoring feature can catch a meaningful slice of issues, such as missing alt text or insufficient contrast, directly in your QA process.

However, you should use more than just automated tools to confirm whether a page genuinely makes sense to someone using a screen reader or navigating by keyboard only, so manual testing with real assistive technology is important.

Digital accessibility also extends beyond the browser to different devices – from small screens on a phone to smart TVs, smart watches, and kiosks – each needing its own accommodations, such as audio description for video content, resizable text, larger touch targets, and interfaces that work with a device's built-in screen reader or voice control.

Digital accessibility example

Here's a small but common example: a form field asking for an email address, with an inline validation error.

An inaccessible version relies on visual cues alone:

<div>Email</div>
  <input type="email" placeholder="Enter your email">
  <div style="color: red;">Please enter a valid email</div>

‍The label here is just a styled <div>, not a real label, so a screen reader has no programmatic way to connect it to the input. The error message isn't linked to the field either, so a screen reader user might never know it appeared.

An accessible version fixes both problems:

<label for="email">Email</label>
<input type="email" id="email" aria-describedby="email-error" aria-invalid="true">
<span id="email-error" role="alert">Please enter a valid email</span>

The <label> element gives the field a persistent, programmatic name. The aria-describedby attribute connects the input to its error message, and role="alert" makes sure a screen reader announces that message the moment it appears, not just if the user happens to navigate onto it.

If you want to see these principles applied across full, real production websites rather than a single snippet, check out these web accessibility examples across industries like e-commerce and government.

Digital accessibility vs. web accessibility

Most people use digital accessibility and web accessibility interchangeably. Technically, web accessibility refers specifically to websites and web content, while digital accessibility is the broader umbrella covering mobile apps, desktop software, kiosks, and other digital products.

The same core accessibility standards apply either way. WCAG was written for the web, but many of its principles have been adapted for native apps and software through related platform-specific guidance.

Common mistakes or misconceptions

• Treating it as a one-time audit. Fixes made before launch tend to erode as new pages and features ship without the same scrutiny, unless accessibility becomes everyone's responsibility and part of your ongoing workflow, not a pre-launch checklist owned by a single team.
• Assuming automated testing catches everything. Automated scanners are good at finding structural issues at scale, but they can't judge whether alt text is genuinely descriptive or whether a page still makes sense when read aloud by a screen reader.
• Designing only for blindness. Accessibility also covers low vision, cognitive disabilities, motor impairments, and hearing loss, so a site that only addresses screen readers still leaves a large part of the disability community without equal access.