Accessibility is usually presented as a checklist of doom — dozens of criteria, arcane tooling, vague threats. In practice, a short list of habits covers the vast majority of real barriers. Here is the list I run on every project before it ships.
Contrast is the headline act
Light-gray body text is the most common failure I see in audits, and the easiest to fix. Body copy should contrast strongly with its background, and placeholder text should never be the only label. If your muted tone fails a contrast check, darken it until it passes — your design survives, and thousands of readers stop squinting.
Everything must work from a keyboard
Unplug your mouse and tab through the page. Every link, button and menu item should receive a visible focus indicator, appear in a sensible order, and never trap you. Dropdowns, modals and sliders need Escape-key behavior and proper roles — these details take an afternoon and unblock entire categories of users.
Design for the keyboard first and touchscreens, screen readers and power users all get better.
Label like someone is listening
Every input needs a real label, every icon-only button needs a name, and every image needs alt text that describes its job — not its pixels. Form errors belong next to the field they describe, announced politely, with focus moved to the first problem.
Respect motion preferences
Parallax, autoplay and looping animation make some visitors physically ill. Honor the reduced-motion setting: keep content fully visible without animation and never autoplay anything with sound. Calm by default is a feature, not a compromise.
Run these four checks on your next release and you'll be ahead of most of the web — then keep going, one improvement per sprint.
