The digital wall we built ourselves

I remember the first time I truly understood what it meant to be locked out of a website. A quiet Tuesday afternoon, watching a friend with a visual impairment try to book a train ticket. He tabbed through the page, screen reader rattling off incomprehensible strings of code, button after button labelled “click here”, images announcing themselves as “image.jpg”. After fifteen minutes of frustration, he closed the laptop and asked me to do it for him.

“It’s just easier this way,” he said.

That sentence has haunted me ever since. Not because it was dramatic - but because it was so terribly, achingly ordinary. Because here’s the thing we don’t want to admit: the web isn’t broken by accident. We broke it. Deliberately, systematically, and with increasing enthusiasm.

The shocking numbers

Every year, WebAIM - the organisation behind the WAVE accessibility evaluation tool - analyses the home pages of the top one million websites on the planet. They do this using automated testing against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level A and AA success criteria.

It is, quite…