Accessible pages support people using assistive technology, but they also help anyone dealing with glare, fatigue, a cracked screen, a temporary injury, or a stressful decision.
Protect reading and navigation
Start with structure. One H1 that states the offer, headings that descend in order, and sections that mean something are the backbone of an accessible page—and the same backbone that makes a page scannable for everyone else.
Contrast and type size come next. Body copy should be comfortable at default browser settings, and text should remain readable when a visitor zooms or increases the base font size. Light gray text on a light background is a design trend that fails a meaningful share of real visitors, including anyone reading outdoors.
Keyboard access is the fastest thing to check and the most commonly broken. Tab through the page from the top: every interactive element should be reachable in a sensible order, focus should always be visible, and nothing should trap focus. Custom buttons and dropdowns are the usual offenders because they were built from generic elements.
Also give links meaning on their own. “Read the landing page audit checklist” works out of context; “click here” does not. Screen-reader users frequently navigate by pulling up a list of links, so vague labels remove the map.
Make forms understandable
Forms are where accessibility failures cost conversions directly. A visitor who cannot tell which field is wrong does not file a bug report—they leave.
The essentials are unglamorous and reliable:
- A visible label for every input, programmatically associated with it.
- Placeholders used for examples, never as the only label.
- Required fields indicated in text, not by color or an unexplained asterisk alone.
- Errors described in words, tied to the field, and announced to assistive technology.
- Focus moved to the first error on a failed submit.
- Correct input types and autocomplete attributes so autofill and mobile keyboards cooperate.
Give people enough time and forgiveness. Avoid short session timeouts on a form, preserve entered data through validation errors, and keep any anti-bot challenge simple, text-based, and solvable without fine motor control or a visual puzzle.
Confirm success in text as well as color. A green checkmark alone leaves too many visitors unsure whether the form actually went through.
Treat motion as optional
Motion can direct attention, but for some visitors it causes nausea, headaches, or genuine disorientation. Treat it as an enhancement with an off switch rather than a core part of the design.
Honor the operating-system reduced-motion preference and provide a static equivalent. That means no parallax, no large-scale movement, and no scroll-triggered reveals when the visitor has asked for less motion—content simply appears.
Even for visitors who have not opted out, restraint helps. Keep transitions short, avoid movement that competes with reading, and never gate content behind an animation. If a headline only appears after a scroll-triggered fade, a slow device or a failed script means it never appears at all.
Avoid anything that moves on its own and cannot be paused: auto-advancing carousels, looping background video with motion, and marquee effects that carry information. If content matters, it should hold still long enough to be read.
Test beyond automated checks
Automated tools are a good first pass and a poor final answer. They reliably catch missing alternative text, contrast failures, and unlabeled inputs; they cannot tell you whether the reading order makes sense or whether an error message is actually helpful.
Add a short manual routine to every launch: navigate the full flow with the keyboard only, read the page top to bottom with a screen reader, zoom the browser to 200 percent and check that nothing is clipped or overlapping, and complete the form without using a mouse.
Check the alternative text you already have. Decorative images should be hidden from assistive technology; informative images should describe the information, not the file. A hero image labeled “hero-final-v3” is worse than no label at all.
Where possible, include people with disabilities in testing. Lived experience surfaces problems that no checklist predicts, and it usually points to the same fixes that make the page clearer for every visitor.
Accessibility is a quality standard for the full decision journey. Clearer pages are more resilient pages—and often more persuasive ones.
Sources and further reading
Our guidance is informed by current primary and research-led resources, including Google’s Web Vitals documentation, Google Search’s people-first content guidance, Nielsen Norman Group’s form usability research, and Baymard Institute’s form and checkout research.