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  • What Designers Get Wrong About Accessible Web Design

    When we talk about accessible web design, most people picture developers digging into code to fix issues after the fact. But the real magic—and often the biggest missed opportunity—starts much earlier in the process. It starts with us, the designers.

    Design isn’t just about how something looks; it’s about how something works. That includes making sure every user can interact with it, regardless of ability. The challenge is, even seasoned designers can unintentionally leave accessibility gaps in their work. Not out of carelessness, but simply because we weren’t taught to think about it.

    Let’s take a look at the most common ways accessible web design gets overlooked in the design phase—and how small changes can make a big difference. These aren’t technical developer fixes. They’re simple, design-first decisions that help create a more inclusive experience for everyone.

    Relying on Color Alone

    Using color to communicate meaning—like red for errors or green for success—might feel intuitive. But it doesn’t work for everyone. People with color vision deficiencies may not distinguish between red and green. Others might be browsing on devices in bright sunlight or with grayscale settings turned on. Color alone just isn’t enough.

    The good news is that accessible web design doesn’t mean ditching color—it means backing it up. A red border becomes more effective with an icon like an exclamation point and a short label that says “Error.” Color still enhances the message, but now it’s readable by everyone, regardless of how they perceive color.

    Poor Contrast Between Text and Background

    Minimalist palettes are trendy, but light gray text on a white background can create a serious readability issue. For users with low vision, poor contrast turns your carefully crafted content into a frustrating puzzle. It’s not just a style choice—it’s a usability barrier.

    Aiming for at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio ensures your text is readable under a wide range of conditions, including mobile screens and bright environments. Tools like WebAIM’s Contrast Checker make it easy to test combinations. With accessible web design, clarity and style can absolutely coexist.

    Hover-Only Interactions

    Hover effects can make an interface feel sleek and modern, especially for desktop users. But the reality is that not everyone navigates with a mouse. Touchscreen devices and keyboard users don’t have the option to hover, which means they could miss essential content like tooltips, dropdowns, or action buttons.

    Accessible web design calls for interaction that works across devices and input types. If something appears on hover, it should also be accessible via keyboard focus or tap. That way, no one is left guessing—or worse, completely missing part of the site.

    Hiding or Removing Focus Styles

    One of the more subtle mistakes designers make is removing focus outlines to make interfaces feel cleaner. That glowing blue ring might not match the brand aesthetic, but it’s a crucial indicator for users navigating with a keyboard. It shows where they are on the page.

    Instead of removing it, try styling the focus indicator in a way that fits your brand. Make it visible, make it intentional. It’s a small touch, but it honors the needs of users who rely on keyboard navigation. That’s the heart of accessible web design—keeping things usable, not just pretty.

    Icon-Only Buttons Without Labels

    A trash can, a gear, a hamburger menu—these are all familiar icons to some of us. But they’re not universal. Assuming every user will instantly recognize what an icon means can create confusion, especially for users with cognitive differences or those who are new to digital interfaces.

    By adding a short label like “Delete” or “Settings,” or by providing an accessible name using ARIA labels, you give your users clarity. Icons still add visual interest, but now they’re functional for everyone. It’s another way accessible web design respects a broader range of experiences.

    Vague Link Text

    Link text like “Click here” or “Learn more” might seem harmless, but it quickly becomes a problem for people using screen readers. These users often navigate by skimming a list of links, completely out of the surrounding context. If all the links say the same thing, it’s impossible to know where they go.

    Writing meaningful link text—like “Download the 2025 Pricing Guide” or “Explore Our Accessibility Services”—adds clarity for everyone. Plus, it’s great for SEO. In accessible web design, clarity and functionality always go hand-in-hand.

    Layouts That Fall Apart When Text Is Resized

    Many users with low vision increase their device’s text size to read more comfortably. But if a layout isn’t built to handle that, the entire page can fall apart. Text overlaps, buttons get cut off, and navigation becomes a mess.

    Designing with flexibility in mind—using relative units like em, rem, or percentages instead of fixed pixel values—helps keep layouts intact even when zoomed in. Responsive grids, media queries, and scalable components all support accessible web design by making sure your content can adapt.

    Skipping Alt Text on Images

    Every image on your site has a purpose, whether it’s decorative or informative. But when you leave out alt text—or worse, insert placeholder text like “image123.jpg”—users who rely on screen readers are left without context.

    Good alt text is short, specific, and helps users understand the image’s role in the content. For example, “Smiling customer using our mobile app” is useful. If the image is decorative and adds no meaningful content, you can mark it as such so screen readers skip it. Accessible web design makes visuals work for everyone, not just those who can see them.

    Hard-Coded Font Sizes

    Hardcoding fonts in pixels may seem like a safe bet for maintaining visual control, but it can limit how users adjust their settings. People who need larger text may be blocked by your choices, especially if CSS prevents scaling.

    By using relative units, you give users control over their reading experience. Fonts should scale with their preferences, not fight against them. Accessible web design puts usability first, allowing your audience to engage with your content in the way that works best for them.

    Overly Complex Navigation

    Mega menus, fancy interactions, and unique navigation patterns can look impressive in a mockup—but they can create major barriers for people using keyboards or assistive tech. When navigation becomes a puzzle, users are more likely to get frustrated and leave.

    The most effective navigation is simple, consistent, and easy to explore. Use clear labels, test with keyboard-only input, and rely on semantic HTML whenever possible. Accessible web design doesn’t mean boring—it means dependable, predictable, and inclusive.

    Where Good Design Meets Real-World Impact

    Designers have the power to make the web more inclusive. And the best part? You don’t have to start from scratch. These changes are often small, thoughtful adjustments that make a big difference for users who rely on them.

    Accessible web design isn’t a limitation—it’s an invitation to create better work. It asks us to go beyond trends and think deeply about the people who use the things we build. With every project, we can help make the internet a place where more people feel seen, supported, and able to fully participate.


    If you’re looking for a partner who understands the balance between beauty, functionality, and accessibility, 216digital is here to help. Together, we can make accessible web design the standard—not the exception.

    Greg McNeil

    April 8, 2025
    How-to Guides, Web Design & Development
    Accessible Design, ADA Lawsuit, How-to, responsive design, UX, Web Accessible Design
  • Black Friday Shopping: Is Your Online Business Ready?

    Black Friday Shopping: Is Your Online Business Ready?

    America’s favorite shopping season is right around the corner and with it a barrage of online bargain shoppers. Is your site ready to handle the Black Friday shopping rush? If the answer is anything but yes, you may want to consider a quick preparatory revamp. Why? Because the year-end holiday season is not only the best time to meet your annual sales goals, but a great time to capture new customers. Following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the last two months of the year are prime for gift-giving; people are shopping for themselves, their family, and their friends. Not to mention, over the last eight years, Black Friday retail e-commerce spending alone went from $534 million USD to $1970 million USD  – and it’s only expected to rise again this year. Which means optimizing your site for online sales now can ensure your business is ready to roll this holiday season. So how can you prepare? The first step is to decide which holidays you want to run promotions on. Once you’ve determined that and set up a promotional calendar, you can move on to polishing your website and online holiday marketing strategy. To make it easier, we’ve compiled a checklist to help get you on your way.

    Getting Your Website in Gear

    Image of a person browsing an ecommerce platform
    1. Check Your Server Traffic Capacity. Black Friday weekend is sure to draw a lot of traffic to your site, especially if you are running promotional deals. So making sure your server can handle the influx of customers is likely to make both their and your experience easier.  Check your server capacity before the season starts at  LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io.
    2. Create Landing Pages for Your Black Friday Deals. If you plan on setting your customers up with some awesome deals, it’s important to make sure they know what they are and where to find them. Landing pages on your website specifically made for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions can help alert your customers to all the seasonal discounts you have on offer. Going the extra mile and creating a banner for your deals to be displayed on every page, will also help ensure no one misses out!
    3. Make sure your website is mobile friendly. The share of mobile sales on Black Friday in 2013 went from 27%  to 48% in 2016. And with more and more customers turning to their phones for online shopping, having a site with responsive design is more important than ever. Don’t know whether your site is mobile ready? Check it out with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. And if you still can’t figure it out, let us take a look!
    4. Test and troubleshoot everything. Even with the best promotions, the holiday shopping season could still be a complete bust if your customers aren’t able to make purchases from your site.  Whether it’s a broken link or simply a slow loading page, it’s important to make sure you’ve tested the durability of your landing pages and made sure your promotional coupons are working fine.
    5. Make the checkout process as seamless as possible. Simplicity is key. Customers like it when they can make a purchase with the fewest clicks possible – and obvious clicks at that. So spend some time ensuring your website has a user friendly interface with clear add/delete item and checkout buttons. And if you need a little help, let us know.
    6. Have your Shipping and Returns Policy for the shopping season in fine print. To prevent any future misunderstandings or complaints, it’s best to have your holiday season shipping and returns policy listed on your website where customers can easily access or see it.
    7. Track EVERYTHING. To make sure you’re getting the results you want and your leads are converting into sales, keep a detailed track record of every change you’ve made to your site and how it has affected your conversions.  A great way to do this is through tracking your Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel data.

    Marketing Yourself Right

    Images of a persons Startup company Now that you have your website ready to go the next thing to tackle is your marketing strategy. To start, look at your past marketing data to see how your business performed during previous years. This will make it easier to plan a marketing strategy as you’ll have a better idea of what worked and what didn’t. Once you have that data, you can start to plan for the future holiday season. And the following tips will help you put your best foot forward!
    1. Research your customers. A good marketing strategy starts with great research. For example, do you know 100% who your customers are? Have you created buyer personas? If you haven’t, check your Google Analytics demographics to ensure that the personas you have in mind match the factual customer data retrieved by Google. This will help you market to not only your current customers, but all potential buyers as well. Still unsure? Take a look at this helpful B2B Buyer Persona Guide for a more in-depth look on how to make your customer-data work for you.
    2. Create a winning PPC Campaign. Pay-per-click is one of the best ways to reach targeted customers. If you have optimized your campaign with the right keywords, your ad should appear at the top of Google’s search results. However, if you did not have the time to get your SEO and keyword targeting in place, PPC can help! For example:
      1. Shopping Ads is one of the best ways to get your products in front of your customers, because its CPC is much lower when compared to a Text Ad, and it can get you better conversion rates. You can also target local customers with Google’s Zip Code Targeting.
      2. And if you are already running PPC campaigns, the holiday season is a good time to start a remarketing campaign. Reach your customers who are actively searching for your products, or are loyal to your business with remarketing campaigns.
    3. Utilize social media for customer insights. Your social media channels can be a treasure trove of information. Places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are full of consumer opinions on products and services. And not just on products they currently use, but items they are interested in buying. Put this information to use by –
      1. Promoting your Black Friday deals on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.
      2. Creating product hype and awareness by offering special discounts to  your followers.
      3. Closely monitoring comments or mentions on your social channels and responding to any customer queries and feedback promptly. You can even make use of social listening tools to listen to what people are saying online about your brand or products.
      4. Creating your own hashtags for the holiday season. You can stick to the regular hashtags of #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday, of course, but you can also create hashtags specific to your business. If you do, make sure you plug them on all your marketing channels- website, social media, and emails.
      5. Using Facebook Dynamic Shopping ads, which are a great way target customers who visited your website and added a product to their cart but never followed through with the purchase.
    4. Start an email campaign targeting current customers. When it comes to getting results, email marketing is still very effective. Triggered emails like those to customers that abandoned full online shopping carts, still tend to bring in more customers than many social media campaigns.  To get the most out of your email campaign –
      1. Categorize your email lists.  Segmenting your emails into specific customer lists based on products they’ve looked at or purchased is likely to get you more email open rates.
      2. Personalize! Include the name of the subscriber and offer specific promotions based on their location.
      3. Create and manage your email workflows in advance. This will ensure that every email is catered to the customer receiving it, and be less work for you in the long run.
      4. Leverage your current customer base through exclusive deals. Not only will this help build anticipation for future Black Friday deals, but it will show your loyal customers that there is  some advantage in following you.
      5. Create a countdown timer for your emails to promote urgency.

    In the End

    No one knows your customers as well as you do and any website adjustment or marketing campaign should be planned with them in mind. However, we hope these tips will help get you and your site on your way to holiday-ready! And if you still have questions, let us know!

    Sources

    Desktop retail spending on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States from 2008 to 2016 Share of mobile online sales on Black Friday from 2013 to 2016 How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business Get Local with ZIP Code targeting Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing Stats Why You Should Spend More on Google Shopping vs Text Ads

    Greg McNeil

    October 18, 2017
    Ecommerce Platforms, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, PPC, Responsive, SEO, Social Media Marketing
    Digital Marketing, ecommerce design, ecommerce website, PPC, responsive design, responsive web design, SEO
  • Future-proofing: Why You Should Go to A Responsive Design

    Future-proofing: Why You Should Go to A Responsive Design

    In case you haven’t heard, having a responsive website is going to be a bigger part of web design moving forward. The common practice in the past was for mobile versions of sites to be given their own subdomain. Essentially, you had two websites with duplicate information and you had twice as much work when you needed to change something. This doubles your development and maintenance costs. It also caused problems when your site was listed in search engines. Now, you could prevent a mobile version of your site from being crawled and listed as a duplicate in search results, then just serve up the mobile version of the site when a mobile browser was detected. However, Google prefers to know exactly what they are serving and a redirect like that is considered bad practice.

    Sites with a “mobile version” also had their limitations. They could only support two screen resolutions: desktop and mobile. Using a tablet, you usually ended up with an over sized smartphone version of the site, or you could end up with a desktop version that was still too small. And if you used the built-in browser on your gaming system, all bets were off. It can be tremendously frustrating not only from the side of usability, but also from a design perspective. Good responsive design practice fixes all of this.

    Google is trying to unify search results and they have been striving for a consistent user experience across all platforms. For the last few months, websites have been eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label within Google Search results if they use a responsive design. The criteria it uses are things like avoidance of flash and other uncommon software on mobile devices, legible text without zooming, automatic horizontal sizing which is scalable to whatever size screen, and “finger friendly” spacing of links.

    This is all great for the end-user, but in the future it could have a big impact on you. Google has been experimenting with the mobile-friendly label in their Search ranking. Sites without a responsive design could be penalized and dropped down the list. It could literally undo the years of hard work on SEO and marketing just by adding a criteria that your site isn’t prepared for.

    Luckily, we at 216digital are experts in responsive design and can quickly and efficiently create a responsive version of your website. If you’d like to read more about the mobile-friendly label and responsive design, Google has provided a few resources to help educate you further and we’ve linked them below.

    Mobile-friendly Test
    Webmasters Mobile Guide
    Mobile usability report
    How-to guide for third-party software

    Greg McNeil

    March 9, 2015
    Responsive
    responsive design
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