A blind customer visits an online shop with a screen reader. The reader announces, one after another: “button, button, graphic, link”. The customer can’t tell which button adds to the basket and which one closes the window. They’ll shop somewhere else.
Most of accessibility is simply careful design and development work: enough contrast, readable typography, logical headings, image descriptions, labels on form fields, keyboard support, captions on videos. Older customers benefit too, and so does someone with an arm in plaster, or someone reading their phone in bright sunlight.
What the law says
In Poland, the websites and apps of public bodies must meet the requirements of the Digital Accessibility Act, which are based on WCAG level AA, and must publish an accessibility statement. Since 28 June 2025, accessibility requirements under the European Accessibility Act have also covered some private companies, including online shops and consumer banking services. Whether they apply to a particular company depends on its services and its size, and that is a question for a lawyer. On the technical side, the reference point is WCAG level AA either way.
What a plugin won’t fix
An accessibility overlay, the button in the corner of a page that enlarges text and changes colours, doesn’t make a site accessible. It won’t add labels to a form, fix the order of headings or describe images the way a person would. Accessibility is built into the design and the code, which means the front end.
Problems often start earlier, in the identity. A light green brand colour on white looks good in a presentation, but text in that colour won’t pass a contrast test. It’s better to know this while designing the colour palette than after the website goes live. In the Urtica project the website had to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA, so accessibility got its own part of the workshops, and the brand book sets out, for each brand colour, what text can sit on it.
The most reliable test is a person: going through the site with only a keyboard and with a screen reader, and on larger projects, usability testing with people with disabilities. Automated tools catch only some of the errors.