Website Accessibility

An accessible website can be used by people with disabilities, including those who navigate with a keyboard, a screen reader, or other assistive technology.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) group this into four principles. Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Level AA is the standard most organizations work toward, and it’s what we build to.

In practice, accessibility is spread across every part of a project. Design decisions about contrast, type size, and spacing. Content decisions about structure, headings, and plain language. Development decisions about markup, keyboard navigation, and how elements behave. Missing these considerations results in barriers to people who shouldn’t be excluded from using your site.

Refoundry is the Gutenberg low-code site builder that we engineered, and every website we build runs on it. Because we’re assembling sites from blocks and components rather than hand-coding them, the accessibility requirements are handled in the tool rather than rebuilt from scratch on every project.

Accessibility testing happens at the plugin level rather than site by site. The components are tested once, and every website built with them inherits that work. The guidelines don’t change often, so we spot check against them periodically and update the tool when something shifts.

It also makes the it easy for your team to keep the site accessible after launch. For example, alt text and link descriptions are set directly in the editor. Another example is heading styles being set independently from heading levels, which sounds small but solves one of the most common accessibility problems on the web. On a lot of sites, people choose a heading level because they want text at a certain size, and the page ends up with an outline that jumps from H2 to H4 or skips H1 entirely. Screen reader users rely on that outline to move around a page. In Refoundry you pick the level that’s structurally correct and style it however you want.

Overlays don’t work, and we won’t put one on your website.

These are the plugins that promise instant compliance, usually marketed as AI-powered. They sit on top of your existing code and try to patch problems as the page loads. They miss real issues, introduce new ones, and interfere with the assistive technology that people already use and know how to operate.

Users with disabilities and accessibility advocates have consistently said for years that this is not a sound approach. The only thing that reliably works is an accessible site at its core elements.

Not on its own. Accessibility isn’t a box you tick once. It’s an ongoing practice.

Your site launches accessible, but every new page, image, PDF, and embedded video is a chance to introduce a barrier. That’s exactly why we care so much about how the Refoundry editor works. If adding alt text is buried three menus deep, it won’t get added. If choosing a heading means choosing a font size, your page structure will drift. If any of this requires a developer to execute it every time, it will be too easy to let it go.

We build your site to be easily maintained without a developer, and we’ll show your team how to make the necessary edits. No agency can promise a website stays compliant forever, and you should be wary of one that does.

It does, though that’s not why we do it.

We build accessible websites because it’s the right thing to do. The fact that sites that meet accessibility standards tend to rank better is an added bonus. Descriptive alt text, a clean heading structure, meaningful link text, and lightweight semantic markup all help search engines and AI tools understand your content, in much the same way they help a screen reader.

There’s a user signal side to it, too. If people can’t use your website, they leave, and search engines notice.