Web accessibility basics every team should ship

Short summary

Web accessibility is not a specialist compliance topic — a handful of fundamentals cover most real-world needs and are cheap to build in from the start. The baseline every team should ship: semantic HTML elements for correct structure and screen-reader support, full keyboard navigability with visible focus, color contrast of at least 4.5:1 for body text, and careful ARIA usage only when native HTML cannot do the job. Maintain accessibility as a habit with automated linters in CI, manual tab-throughs, and occasional screen-reader testing rather than treating it as a pre-launch audit.

• •Use semantic HTML (button, a, headings, landmarks, labels) to solve most accessibility issues for free
• •Ensure full keyboard navigability, visible focus rings, and minimum 4.5:1 text contrast
• •Reserve ARIA for genuinely custom widgets; bad ARIA is worse than none
• •Run automated linters in CI and do manual tab-throughs and screen-reader checks

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