What Six Months of Accessibility Audits Taught Us
Over the past six months, we conducted over 60 accessibility audits across our maintenance clients' sites. The goal was straightforward: make sure every client site we support offered a good experience for everyone. For smaller sites, audits were often quick – some missing alt text here, a few misplaced headings there. For larger sites, the same goal required documentation, education, and client approval on sitewide changes.
The Downside of Purely Aesthetic Design
The most common thing I found across every site I audited was that visual aesthetic had been prioritized over function. Over the past six months, I've spent a lot of time looking back at projects that didn't build accessibility into the initial design process. What I found was hard to ignore.
The core issue is exclusion and friction. When your site is accessible, it's easy to use for people across all ability spectrums. And when your site is easy to navigate and your content is well-written, that also benefits your SEO. It helps your site get found, your business stand out, and your brand recognition increase.
Even though I appreciate accessibility tools and platforms like WAVE, Lighthouse, Silktide, etc., it’s important to understand that tools and their scores are not the whole truth. Accessibility is a major part of design.
When Accessibility Is Left Out of the Design Process
When accessibility isn't built into the design process from the start, it becomes a problem later. Auditing sites that didn't prioritize accessibility or WCAG standards created a ripple effect. From page to page, the same inconsistencies kept surfacing. Most of them weren't hard to solve in the beginning stages, but once a system is built broken, it stays broken. Maintenance falls back on a flimsy foundation and an overhaul feels too daunting to tackle. Things like heading hierarchy issues, misused elements, contrast failures, are commonplace. Working backwards not only takes significantly more time, it often creates a whole new set of problems.
This is why I think about accessibility while I think about design.
Pros and Cons of Squarespace Accessibility Features
Our studio uses Squarespace as a platform, and it works beautifully for what our clients need. There's a lot it gets right on the accessibility front. You can: write alt text on images, list sections, and more. Keyboard navigation is handled well through a visible focus state that shows you exactly where you are as you move through a site. Squarespace also supports captions for videos, transcripts for audio, and motion-safe formats for animations. Their color panel makes it possible to adjust text and background contrast to meet WCAG guidelines without needing custom CSS. For commerce, the checkout experience includes labeled form fields and clear CTAs. You can even generate a VPAT, a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, that documents how your site meets key accessibility standards.
Where it falls short: you can't write alt text for video thumbnails, carousels, or galleries. And blog post item titles default to H1, which is a problem because there should only ever be one H1 per page. Small things, but they matter.
As Tech Grows the Gaps Show
Inclusive design benefits everyone. Someone I look to who has a ton of meaningful experience in this space is Kat Holmes, a leader in inclusive design, which is adjacent to accessibility but not quite the same thing. As she writes in "What We're Leaving Out of the Discussion Around Inclusive Design" via AIGA Eye on Design, "Exclusion is not a PR-friendly word, but it is a universal human experience. We all know how it feels when we're left out." This ties back to Hueman Studio’s purpose of putting people first and design second.
As technology gets better, we'll see new gaps emerge that we haven't even anticipated yet. The industry is evolving, but it needs to involve the right people, the ones most affected by exclusion. We're also walking into an age where AI is writing code at scale that isn't necessarily accessible, and the people using it don't know what they don't know. Even if you prompt AI to be accessible, that still removes the actual humans it's supposed to serve from the process entirely. By keeping human audiences, empathy, and inclusion as our “north star”, every design becomes an open conversation. One we are willing to revisit and improve as accessibility evolves.
Final Thoughts
Bake accessibility in from the start, not as a second thought or a last minute checklist. It is a priority as much as creating something visually appealing. When you understand the purpose behind every element, the rules stop feeling like restrictions and start feeling like a foundation. Accessible websites can absolutely have taste and style. There's no finish line in accessibility. Not in pursuit of perfection, but in pursuit of accepting that as technology grows, the gaps will grow with it. That leaves plenty of room to learn and build better.
If you want to run your own accessibility audit, check out our Accessible by Design series, where we detail step by step how to do that.