Accessibility Best Practices for Modern Web Applications

Accessibility is a legal requirement for digital products in the United States. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act have both been interpreted by courts to require that digital products be accessible to people with disabilities. Beyond the legal requirement, accessible products reach a larger audience: roughly one in four American adults lives with some form of disability.

Start at the Token Layer

The most efficient place to embed accessibility requirements is at the design token layer. If the color tokens in a design system are defined with WCAG contrast ratios as a constraint, then every component that uses those tokens inherits that constraint. Accessibility becomes structural rather than something added at the end.

Semantic HTML First

The most common and most preventable accessibility defects come from using the wrong HTML element for the job. A div that behaves like a button, a span that contains a list, a table used for layout: these patterns require significant ARIA markup to repair, and even then the result is rarely as robust as the correct semantic element would have been.

Keyboard Navigation

Every interactive element in an application must be reachable and operable using only the keyboard. This means maintaining a logical focus order, making focus visible, implementing the correct keyboard interaction patterns for complex widgets like menus, dialogs, and carousels, and ensuring that no keyboard traps exist.

Testing with Real Assistive Technology

Automated testing tools catch approximately 30 to 40 percent of WCAG violations. The remainder require manual testing with screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, and high contrast display modes. Building this testing into the development workflow, rather than treating it as a separate audit phase, is what separates teams that consistently ship accessible products from those that address accessibility problems after the fact.