Accessibility retrofits are painful and expensive. Built in from the start, most of it costs nothing extra.
The cheap version is the early version
Adding semantic markup and a visible focus state while building costs essentially nothing. Adding them to a finished app means unpicking components that were never designed for it.
The habits that cover most of it
- Use real
<button>and<a>elements instead of clickable divs - Never remove a focus ring without replacing it with something visible
- Check contrast at design time, not in a pre-launch audit
- Give every image an
altthat says what it is for - Try the whole flow with the keyboard alone before shipping
None of these need specialist knowledge. They need to be habits rather than a checklist someone runs at the end.
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