Clear thinking on inclusive web design
Product images carry much of the information a shopper needs to decide. A practical audit routine can separate useful descriptions from decorative noise, keyword padding and missing text — and give content teams a repeatable standard that satisfies WCAG 1.1.1 without turning every image into an essay.
Parallax heroes, autoplay video and animated carousels can make UK retail sites unusable for vestibular-sensitive shoppers. This practical guide explains how to respect prefers-reduced-motion across product discovery, product pages, basket and checkout. It includes implementation notes and testing prompts for design and content teams.
Cookie consent banners are often reviewed for legal compliance and rarely for accessibility. This opinion piece examines the focus traps, tiny close controls, colour-only status messages and screen reader confusion that recur in UK consent interfaces, and sets out a practical review checklist. It argues that accessible consent is an editorial and design responsibility, not merely a legal one.
Many UK council homepages pass automated checks yet fall apart when a low-vision resident zooms to 400%. This practical guide explains the reflow test in plain English and sets out a repeatable audit routine for web teams.
Sign-in and password flows remain a neglected weak point in UK accessibility work, from council portals to retail accounts. WCAG 2.2 raises the standard, but passkeys and authentication design need careful handling if they are to include rather than exclude.
PDFs remain a stubborn accessibility gap in councils, NHS trusts, and government agencies. This guide explains the common failure modes, the hidden cost of retrospective remediation, and a practical route to HTML-first publishing.
Accessibility overlays promise quick compliance, but UK organisations need to ask what such tools actually detect, what they hide, and who carries the risk when barriers remain. The Equality Act 2010 is not satisfied by a floating toolbar.
Accessibility statements are compulsory, public and read almost exclusively by people who have just hit a barrier. This guide sets out what the 2018 regulations genuinely ask for, examines the omissions that make statements useless, and offers a working structure any UK organisation can adopt in an afternoon.
For five working days I ran my life through the tab key: banking, council tax, train tickets, the weekly shop. What I found was not a catalogue of exotic failures but a handful of ordinary ones, repeated everywhere — and cheap to fix.
Small UK charity digital teams cannot fix everything at once. This plain-English guide sets out twelve WCAG 2.2 AA checks that make a real difference to disabled visitors, plus three time-consuming activities that are often overrated.
Most UK web teams still assess accessibility through visual QA and automated scans, then wonder why screen reader users struggle. This opinion piece examines the gap between sighted assumptions and assistive technology use, and sets out a practical, low-cost route to testing with blind and low-vision people.