Web accessibility ensures digital content and applications are usable by everyone—including people with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities—through standards like WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). It's not just a legal requirement under laws like the ADA and Section 508, but a fundamental principle of inclusive design: when you build for accessibility, you create better experiences for all users—whether someone is navigating by keyboard, using a screen reader, experiencing low vision, or simply using a mobile device in bright sunlight. What makes accessibility critical in 2026 is the April 24 deadline for WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance for public entities, the nine new success criteria in WCAG 2.2, and the growing use of AI-powered testing tools that catch issues earlier in development—shifting accessibility from retrofit to foundation, where proper semantic HTML and ARIA attributes are not afterthoughts but core architectural decisions that determine whether your site works for 15% of the world's population.

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