Accessibility isn't a checkbox, it's a better website

Anyone who has a website built knows the list. Accessibility sits at the bottom, as a technical requirement still to be ticked off: WCAG level AA, colour contrast, alt texts. Done. Or, quicker still: a widget goes on that promises to make the site accessible in one click. Both miss the same point. Accessibility isn't a layer you put over the top, it's how you build the site. And that is exactly where a better website is there for the taking.

---

The law is the trigger, not the argument

Public bodies have had to be accessible for years. Since 28 June 2025, that also applies, via the European Accessibility Act, to private companies serving consumers in the EU: web shops, banks, telecoms, transport. New services must comply immediately, while services that already existed have a transition period until 28 June 2030. The standard is WCAG 2.1 level AA, set out in the European standard EN 301 549. Only micro-enterprises (fewer than ten people and under two million in turnover) fall outside it; the fines vary by country and run into the hundreds of thousands of euros.

That is the trigger. It is not the argument. The law says what the minimum is, not why that minimum also simply makes for a better website. Anyone who builds purely from the obligation ticks a box. Anyone who understands what accessibility does builds better.

---

The widget that actually makes it worse

The temptation is great to handle it in one click: an overlay widget, a piece of code that promises to make your site accessible automatically. It doesn't work, and it can actively land you in trouble. The American regulator FTC fined overlay provider accessiBe one million dollars in 2025 for misleading claims; the widget did not make sites comply with the standard, contrary to the promise. In the first half of 2025, almost a quarter of all American accessibility lawsuits were aimed at sites that had installed exactly such a widget.

The reason is simple. An overlay repairs at most twenty to forty percent of the problems and doesn't touch the core: the heading structure, the form labels, the keyboard operation. Worse still, it often lays a layer over the site that actually gets in a screen reader's way. A widget hides the problem for whoever installs it, not for whoever really uses the site differently. Accessibility can't be pasted over the top. It's in the build, or it isn't there at all.

---

Building accessibly is simply building well

The most basic requirement is readable text, logical headings, enough white space. That isn't a favour to a small group, it's what every visitor needs who wants to grasp quickly what is written. Nielsen Norman Group has shown for years that visitors read on average twenty to thirty percent of the words on a page. They scan, they jump, they look for the core. Whether it comes across depends on clear subheadings and short paragraphs. Accessibility forces that clarity, and clarity is rarely a drawback.

The same goes for the structure underneath. Clean HTML, skip links and a logical heading order are the tools for someone using a screen reader. They are also exactly what someone on a phone needs who is looking for one answer. And Google's search robot reads the same signals: semantic HTML, headings, alt texts and fast loading times are equally the building blocks of findability. An accessible page gets found better, not as a side effect, but as the logical result of the same choices.

Contrast is therefore not a design detail. The WCAG standard for ordinary text is a ratio of 4.5 to 1. Text that is readable for someone who sees poorly is also readable for someone looking at their phone in the sun, on an old screen, or in a room with backlight. The question is not whether text is readable in the conditions it was designed in, but in those where people actually read it. And contrast in particular is the most common mistake on the web: the WebAIM Million found contrast that was too low on 79 percent of the homepages examined.

---

The four principles as a compass, not a checklist

WCAG is not a list of separate little rules, but rests on four principles. We use them not as a checklist afterwards, but as a compass from the first design.

These four together make the difference between a site that happens to score on a few points and a site that works for everyone. They are also the reason accessibility is a design choice, not a repair, and certainly not a widget.

---

How you hold on to it: the system underneath

A site isn't accessible just once. It stays so, or it loses it with every newsletter, every new page, every block a manager without technical knowledge adds. That is where the content management system comes in, and that is where Schwung makes a deliberate choice.

Many systems can be built accessibly; that alone is therefore no argument. Schwung chooses Umbraco for what sits behind it: a custom backend we shape entirely to our hand, strong connections to external sources, and as few standard plug-ins as possible. That last point sounds technical, but that is where accessibility is won or lost. Every off-the-shelf plug-in is code you don't control yourself, and which wrecks your accessibility and brand style just as easily as it strengthens them.

In practice we lock the visual identity and the accessibility into predefined content blocks. Managers work with building blocks: a header, a hero, a text block, an FAQ, a form, a calendar, all within the brand style and within the four principles. They don't need technical knowledge and can't accidentally break the accessibility, because it's built into the block. That way a site stays accessible without a developer looking over every change. It isn't the plug-in that ensures the quality, the foundation does that.

---

The bill for postponing

Anyone who repairs accessibility afterwards works against existing choices: colours already baked into the brand style, structures already locked into the CMS, templates already rolled out across a hundred pages. Building it in during construction is always cheaper than fixing it after.

And the gap is large. The WebAIM Million, the annual study into the accessibility of the million most visited homepages, found in 2025 that 94.8 percent of homepages demonstrably fail the standard. One encouraging figure: 96 percent of all errors fall into six recurring categories, with contrast that is too low and missing alt texts at the front. The heavy lifting is therefore in doing a handful of things well, not in a hundred separate repairs.

That is not only a legal risk, it is a missed market. The worldwide spending power of people with a disability and those close to them runs into the trillions, and 71 percent of them leave a site that is difficult to use because of their disability (ClickAway Pound). Anyone who lets their site stay inaccessible actively sends part of their visitors out the door, or never sees them come in.

---

What this means for anyone who runs a website

An accessible website demands no different ambition than a good website. It calls for the same things: clear texts, logical structure, fast loading times, readable letters, and a system that holds on to it. The standards for accessibility are not an extra layer on top of quality, they describe what quality means in practice.

For anyone now having a website built or renewed, accessibility is therefore not a negotiable item on the budget, and not a widget you stick on later. It is the question of whether the site does its job for everyone who needs it, and whether it still does so in three years, when the legislation tightens further and the audience grows broader.

---

Further reading on schwungreclame.nl

• Schwung | agency for web design and web development in Tilburg
• Branding and recruitment communication with Schwung