You can pass an automated audit and still ship something people cannot use.
You can pass an automated audit and still ship something people cannot use.
Missing alternative text, poor colour contrast, unlabelled inputs, broken heading order. Real problems, worth fixing, and roughly a third of what matters.
Whether the focus order makes sense. Whether a custom component announces what it is. Whether an error message tells someone what to do. Whether the site works without a mouse at all.
None of that is detectable without using the thing the way an affected person would.
Keyboard-navigable, screen-reader coherent, readable at 200% zoom, and usable with motion reduced. Build to that and the audit passes on its own.
Unplug the mouse and navigate the site with the keyboard alone. Turn on a screen reader for ten minutes. Zoom the page to 200% and see what breaks.
You will find more in that half hour than in most automated audit reports, and you will understand the findings rather than just receiving them.
Native elements are accessible by default because browsers have already solved them. Every custom dropdown, modal and tab set is a promise to reimplement behaviour you were being given for free.
Sometimes that promise is worth making. It should be a deliberate decision rather than a styling convenience.
Clear focus states, sensible heading order, real labels and adequate contrast make a site better for everyone, not only for people using assistive technology.
Treating accessibility as a separate compliance exercise is what makes it feel expensive. Treated as part of building things properly, most of it is free.
Keyboard traps. A modal that opens and cannot be closed without a mouse strands anyone navigating by keyboard, which includes people with motor impairments and a surprising number of power users. Tab through your own site with the mouse unplugged and you will find one within minutes.
Missing focus indicators. The outline gets removed because a designer found it ugly, and the site becomes unusable for anyone not pointing at it. Design a better focus style; do not delete it.
Form fields without labels. A placeholder is not a label: it disappears the moment someone types, and it is not reliably announced. This single mistake makes checkouts unusable with a screen reader.
Colour as the only signal. Marking an invalid field in red and nothing else means it is not marked at all for a substantial minority of your visitors.
Automated checks catch perhaps a third of real issues, and they catch the easy third. They will find a missing alt attribute; they cannot tell you that alt="image" is worse than nothing, because it passes the rule while failing the purpose.
They cannot judge whether the reading order makes sense, whether an error message is comprehensible, or whether a custom dropdown behaves the way a native one does. Those need a person.
A useful habit is to have one person on each project navigate the main flows by keyboard alone, and one to listen to a page in a screen reader. Neither takes long, and both find things no scanner reports.
Captions get used most by people in noisy rooms. Clear labels help everyone filling in a form on a train. Sufficient contrast matters to anyone outside in daylight. The measures overlap almost entirely with plain quality.
There is a legal dimension in most markets, and it is tightening rather than loosening. But the practical argument is stronger: an inaccessible checkout is a checkout losing money, and it does so silently because the people it excludes do not complain, they leave.
Build it in from the start and it is close to free. Retrofit it later and it is a project of its own.