There's a test I sometimes ask marketing leaders to try.Open your website on your phone. Turn on VoiceOver, or TalkBack if you're onAndroid, close your eyes, and try to find your services page and submit anenquiry. No tapping. Just the keyboard.
Most people give up within thirty seconds. The ones who push through tend to get stuck in a navigation loop, or they hear "link, link, link, image, link" read aloud with zero context. It's genuinely disorienting. And it's what a meaningful chunk of your potential clients are dealing with right now, on your actual website.
Quick note before I go further: this piece is written by Nichola Hudson, who leads UX at Distinction. Accessibility is something I care about - not in a preachy, worthy way, but because after fifteen-plus years of designing digital experiences, I've come to believe that how a firm handles it says more about them than almost any other design decision. It's a proxy for attention to detail. For whether you actually mean it when you say you're "client-focused."
Accessibility requirements will make our site look generic. We need design flexibility, not constraints.
I hear this constantly. And I get it - there's a persistent myth that WCAG compliance means stripping your site back to something that looks like it was built in 2004. Big fonts, garish colours, zero personality. That's just not true. But unpicking that myth requires more than "trust me" - it requires specific examples and a different way of thinking about what accessibility actually is.
So let me try.
When a prospective client visits your website, they're forming an opinion before they've read a single word of your thought leadership. The speed at which the page loads. Whether the navigation makes sense. Whether the typography is legible. All of this registers unconsciously, and it shapes whether someone trusts you enough to pick up the phone.
Accessibility is part of that same equation. A website that's properly structured, clearly labelled, logically navigable, and works across devices and assistive technologies is sending a signal: we pay attention. We think about the people on the other end of this. We don't cut corners.
For a professional services firm - law, consulting, financial services, accountancy - that signal matters enormously. Your entire business model is built on trust. You're asking clients to hand over sensitive information, pay significant fees, and believe you'll handle their problems with care. If your website can't handle a keyboard user, what does that say about your attention to detail elsewhere?
This is the argument I wish more firms would lead with, rather than treating accessibility as a box-ticking exercise driven by legal risk. The legal risk is real - I'll get to that - but it's the secondary argument.
Even if the trust argument doesn't land with every stakeholder, the regulatory one is getting harder to ignore.
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 already requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled users. It's been there for years. Enforcement has been patchy, which has allowed a lot of firms to quietly assume it doesn't really apply to them.
It does.
The bigger shift is coming from the EU. The European Accessibility Act comes into force in June 2025, and it applies to a wide range of digital products and services. If your firm operates in Europe, has European clients, or is part of a supply chain that touches the EU, this is directly relevant. It's modelled on WCAG 2.1 Level AA - the same standard most accessibility professionals recommend as the baseline anyway.
In the US, the ADA has been increasingly applied to websites, with a steady rise in digital accessibility lawsuits. Over 4,000 were filed in 2023 alone. The direction of travel is clear: regulators and courts are treating inaccessible websites as a liability, not a grey area.
But here's my honest view. If the only reason you're investing in accessibility is to avoid getting sued, you'll do the minimum, resent the cost, and end up with a website that technically passes an automated audit but still provides a rubbish experience for anyone who actually needs those features. Compliance as a motivator produces compliance-grade work. Quality as a motivator produces something much better.
Right, let's tackle this properly, because it's the objection I encounter most.
The idea that accessible websites look bland is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what WCAG actually requires. It doesn't dictate your visual identity. It doesn't tell you what colours to use, what typefaces to choose, or how to lay out your pages. What it does is set minimum thresholds for things like colour contrast ratios, text sizing, and interactive element behaviour - thresholds that any competent designer should be hitting anyway.
Think about building regulations. Nobody looks at a beautifully designed house and says, "What a shame they had to make the staircase a certain width." The constraints are invisible in good architecture. They're part of what makes the building work.
Apple.com is one of the most visually distinctive websites on the internet. It's also one of the most accessible. Clean typography, generous spacing, proper heading hierarchy, excellent keyboard navigation. The visual identity isn't compromised by any of this.
GOV.UK is deliberately restrained, I'll grant you that, but it consistently ranks among the most usable websites in the world. That usability, built on accessibility principles from day one, has become a design language in its own right. Hundreds of organisations now aspire to that level of clarity. Boring? Fine. Effective? Absolutely.
And then there's Stripe. Bold colour, animation, complex layouts - all built to WCAG AA standard. The design team there has talked publicly about how accessibility constraints actually improved their process by forcing clearer visual hierarchies. The constraint produced better design decisions, not worse ones.
I've been designing websites for over fifteen years. The projects where accessibility was baked in from the start consistently produced better-looking, better-performing websites than the ones where it was bolted on at the end. Every single time. I'm not being diplomatic about this - it's just what I've seen, repeatedly, across a lot of different clients and sectors.
I know. Every accessibility article makes this argument. But it's true, so I'm making it anyway.
Proper heading structure helps screen readers navigate your content. It also helps Google understand it. We've seen clients improve their search rankings meaningfully just by fixing their heading hierarchy and adding proper alt text. It's not magic - search engines and screen readers need similar things from your markup.
Sufficient colour contrast helps users with low vision. It also helps everyone reading your site on a phone in bright sunlight, or on a dodgy monitor in a meeting room, or at the end of a long day when their eyes are tired. I was on a train last week trying to read a law firm's website on my phone. Light grey body text on a white background. Genuinely illegible. That's not an edge case - that's a Tuesday afternoon.
Keyboard navigability helps users who can't use a mouse. It also helps power users who prefer keyboard shortcuts, people with temporary injuries. Voice control interfaces, which are becoming more common as AI assistants mature.
Clear, well-structured content helps users with cognitive disabilities. It also helps busy managing partners skimming your site between meetings, non-native English speakers, and anyone who just wants to find what they're looking for without reading three paragraphs of waffle first.
An accessible website is, by definition, a more usable website. And a more usable website converts better, ranks better, and reflects better on your firm.
These aren't theoretical improvements. Most of them take less than an hour.
Colour contrast. Run your site through WebAIM's contrast checker - it's free and takes about ten seconds per colour combination. WCAG AA requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text. About 70% of the professional services websites I review fail on contrast somewhere - usually in secondary text, placeholder text in forms, or those fashionable light grey captions that designers love and users can't read.
Heading structure. One H1 per page. Headings follow a logical hierarchy - H2 after H1, H3 after H2. No skipping levels. This sounds trivial, but it's astonishing how many sites have five H1s on a single page, or jump from H2 to H5 because someone liked the way the smaller heading looked. Screen readers use heading structure to navigate. Search engines use it to understand content hierarchy. Fix this and you improve both in one go.
Alt text on images. Every meaningful image needs descriptive alt text. Not "image1.jpg". Not "photo". A brief description of what the image shows and why it's there. Decorative images - visual flourishes, background textures - should have empty alt attributes (alt="") so screen readers skip them. This is usually the single biggest accessibility failure I find in audits, and one of the easiest to fix.
Keyboard navigation. Tab through your entire website using just the keyboard. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you see where you are at any point? Can you skip the main navigation and get to the content? Focus states - those visual outlines that show which element is selected - are often deliberately removed by designers who think they look ugly. Please stop doing this. There are ways to style focus states that look good and serve their purpose.
Form labels. Every form field needs a visible label and a programmatic association between the label and the field. Placeholder text is not a label - it disappears when you start typing, which is useless for anyone who needs to check what they were supposed to enter. I reviewed a professional services website last month where the contact form had six fields, none of them labelled, all relying on placeholder text. Submitting it was an act of faith.
Link text. "Click here" and "read more" are meaningless to a screen reader user hearing a list of links out of context. "Read our guide to AI readiness for law firms" tells them exactly what they'll get. Five minutes per page. Genuinely.
Accessibility isn't a standalone project. Or rather, it can be - a focused audit and remediation sprint is often the best way to start - but the real value comes when it's embedded in how you think about your digital experience overall.
It's easy to assume your site is fine when you're experiencing it the way it was designed to be experienced: full vision, a mouse, a decent screen, and familiarity with where everything is. Most of the firms I work with have never actually tested it any other way. Not because they don't care, but because nobody's checked.
If accessibility improvement is part of a broader digital investment - a redesign, a re-platform, a CX overhaul - there's a companion piece on how to build that business case without treating accessibility as an afterthought bolted onto the budget. Because that's usually what happens: it becomes a line item that gets cut when costs need trimming, precisely because it was never framed as integral to the quality of the experience.
We've been meaning to look at accessibility, but it feels like a massive project and we don't know where to start.
It doesn't have to be massive. Start with the quick wins above. Run a contrast check. Tab through your homepage. Turn on a screen reader for five minutes. You'll learn more about your site in that exercise than in six months of analytics dashboards.
And if you want a proper assessment - an accessibility audit takes about two days and produces a prioritised list of improvements. Not a 200-page document that gathers dust. A practical list that tells you what to fix first, what can wait, and what the impact of each change will be.
Because accessibility isn't the thing that makes your website less interesting. It's the thing that makes it actually work - for everyone. And for a firm that sells expertise and attention to detail, that's not a nice-to-have.
That's the whole point.