What is Accessibility?
Web accessibility has two levels that get confused constantly in day to day work. One is legal: whoever is covered has to meet certain requirements. The other is practical: whether a person can actually work with your site. The second level applies always, including to everyone the first one never reaches.
The law bites more narrowly than the debate suggests. In Germany, section 1(3) of the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz lists five services exhaustively; in Austria, section 2 of the Barrierefreiheitsgesetz does the same. Microenterprises providing services are expressly exempt. A website that only describes what you offer is not electronic commerce.
The share of the work that is editorial rather than technical is routinely underestimated. Alternative text for images, captions for video, meaningful link text, a sensible heading order: that is writing, not rebuilding. The technical half, meaning contrast, keyboard operation and form labels, belongs in the design system and gets solved once rather than page by page.
Why does Accessibility matter?
The practical payoff sits exactly where the obligation ends: alt text, captions and transcripts are the only form in which the content of images and video exists as text. Without that text, an embedded video contributes nothing to a page's written substance. What is not present as text can neither be found nor reproduced inside an answer.
Accessibility in practice
- 01An explainer video gets a corrected caption file and, below it, the edited transcript with subheadings, rather than just being embedded.
- 02A chart carries its figures in the alt text and again in the caption, while a purely decorative image gets an empty alt attribute.
- 03The link text reads "pricing for ongoing support" instead of "click here", so it still makes sense out of context.
