Where to Start With Accessibility When It Feels Too Big

The first thing to understand: you don’t have to fix everything at once

When organizations encounter WCAG 2.2 for the first time, the response is often a mixture of genuine concern and overwhelm. There are 78 success criteria across three conformance levels. The supporting techniques documentation is enormous. Automated scans produce lists of hundreds of issues. It feels like you’d need to pause everything and dedicate months of development time before you could even think about calling your site accessible.

This feeling is understandable but misleading. Accessibility improvement is not a binary state — accessible or not accessible. It’s a spectrum, and meaningful progress is possible from where you are right now, even if where you are is “we haven’t thought about this before.”

The goal of this guide is to help you start.

Why feeling overwhelmed is normal

Web accessibility feels big because it genuinely is big. WCAG covers visual presentation (contrast, text sizing, spacing), auditory content (captions, transcripts), interaction (keyboard navigation, timing, motion), semantics (structure, labels, roles), and cognitive considerations (language, consistency, error recovery). It applies across desktop, mobile, and assistive technology. It affects design, content, development, and testing.

But here’s what changes the picture: most accessibility failures cluster around a small number of patterns. Year after year, the WebAIM Million report (which analyzes the top million most-visited websites) finds that the same six issues account for the overwhelming majority of automatically detectable WCAG failures:

1. Low color contrast
2. Missing alt text on images
3. Missing form input labels
4. Empty links (links with no text)
5. Missing document language
6. Empty buttons (buttons with no text)

These six patterns alone are present on over 95% of home pages tested. Fixing them on your site doesn’t make you fully accessible, but it removes barriers that affect the largest number of users with disabilities. It’s a meaningful starting point.

Step 1: Understand your current position

Before you can prioritize fixes, you need to know where you stand. A free automated scan gives you this in minutes.

Automated tools are not a complete accessibility solution — they reliably catch only 30–40% of WCAG failures, because most barriers require human judgment to detect. But they are excellent at finding the common, automatable failures listed above: contrast, missing alt text, unlabeled inputs, and similar structural issues.

Run a free scan of your site. Look at what comes back. The issues flagged are real — they won’t be false positives for the common patterns — and they’re a concrete starting list.

Step 2: Prioritize by impact, not by completeness

Once you have a list, the temptation is to address every item in order. Resist this. Instead, prioritize by the combination of impact and frequency:

Highest impact (fix first):

• Any barriers in your checkout, signup, or primary conversion flow — if users can’t complete the transaction, the accessibility failure is costing you business
• Login and authentication barriers — users who can’t get in can’t use anything
• Navigation — if users can’t find pages, page-level accessibility doesn’t matter

High impact (fix second):

• Core content pages: product pages, information pages, the content users specifically visit to get
• Form fields and their labels and error messages — forms are where interaction happens
• Contrast failures — these affect a very large population and are usually straightforward fixes

Important but lower urgency (fix later):

• Archive content and older pages that get low traffic
• Edge-case interactions and WCAG criteria that affect smaller populations
• Level AAA requirements (which go beyond the legal standard)

You don’t need to achieve perfect scores before your highest-traffic, highest-conversion pages are accessible. Get those right first.

Step 3: Add manual testing for what automation misses

Once your automated issues are under control, the next layer is manual testing. This is where you’ll find:

• Keyboard navigation failures — can users tab through your entire site without a mouse?
• Focus management problems — after a modal opens, does focus move into the modal? After it closes, does it return?
• Screen reader behavior — does your custom dropdown announce its state? Does your carousel communicate which slide is active?
• Logical reading order — if you strip CSS, does the page still make sense?

The fastest way to get started with manual testing is:

1. Unplug your mouse and try to complete your site’s primary user journey using only your keyboard (Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space, Escape, arrow keys). Note everything that breaks.

2. Download a free screen reader (NVDA for Windows is free; VoiceOver is built into Mac and iOS). Navigate your most important pages. Listen to what gets announced. Is it coherent?

3. Use the browser’s accessibility tools — both Chrome and Firefox have accessibility inspectors that show the accessibility tree, ARIA roles, and computed accessible names for every element.

These tests take time to learn but cost nothing, and they’ll find issues that no automated tool will.

Step 4: Build it into your workflow

The most expensive way to do accessibility is to treat it as a remediation exercise — fix the site, declare victory, and then watch new barriers accumulate with each new feature release.

Sustainable accessibility means changing how you work:

• Design review — does the design meet contrast requirements? Are interactive states visible?
• Development — are native HTML elements used where possible? Are form fields labeled? Do custom components have correct ARIA?
• Content — does every image have appropriate alt text? Are links descriptive?
• Testing — does CI block on accessibility regressions? Is there a manual testing step before major releases?

Our guide on accessibility in the software development lifecycle goes deeper on what this looks like in practice. Our CI/CD integration service makes the automated layer part of every build.

Setting realistic expectations

For a website that has never been accessibility-reviewed, achieving WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance across every page is typically a multi-month project — longer for large, complex sites with significant legacy code.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make meaningful progress in the next two weeks. Fixing the six most common issues I listed above makes your site materially more accessible for a significant population, even if it doesn’t make you legally compliant.

The frame I find most useful: aim for continuous improvement rather than compliance-as-destination. Every sprint cycle, resolve a set of identified issues. Run automated checks on new features before they ship. Schedule manual testing quarterly. Build an accessibility statement that honestly reflects your current state and your roadmap.

Organizations that approach it this way tend to make faster overall progress than those who wait until they can resource a complete remediation project.

Where to start today

If you haven’t done anything yet: run a free scan. You’ll have a real list of real issues in two minutes, prioritized by severity. That’s your starting point.

If you’ve run scans but haven’t moved to manual testing: try the keyboard-only test on your checkout flow today. If you find barriers, you’ve found your next priority.

If you’re doing manual testing but haven’t integrated it into your workflow: read our guide on accessibility in the development process and identify one point in your current workflow where an accessibility check could be added.

Progress beats perfection. Start somewhere.