What Is Digital Accessibility and Why Does It Matter?

Around 1.3 billion people worldwide live with disabilities — one in six people. It is also worth remembering that we ourselves often experience situational inaccessibility, which affects how we use services and products. You may know this situation: you are in a noisy environment and watching a film, but the lack of captions becomes a real barrier. Or you are on a public authority’s website and need to complete a form with many fields, faint text, no supporting information, and an unintuitive structure; you cannot navigate it with a keyboard. You feel lost and stressed that something may go wrong. For some users, this is a minor inconvenience; for others, it is an insurmountable barrier.

Accessibility concerns every user, including ourselves.

What is WCAG?

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: a set of guidelines for creating websites and applications that are accessible to the widest possible audience, especially people with disabilities.

WCAG 2.1, published in 2018, is currently one of the most widely used accessibility standards. WCAG 2.2, published in 2023, introduced a further nine success criteria.

The latest version, WCAG 3.0, is currently being developed. It is intended to cover mobile applications, IoT systems, electronic documents, and other forms of user interfaces. All guidelines and recommendations are grouped under four core principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Each principle includes guidelines with success criteria that define conformance with a given guideline at levels A, AA, and AAA.

The guidelines specify concrete requirements that allow users to view content with appropriate contrast, navigate by keyboard, use assistive technologies such as screen readers, understand the information presented, and easily consume content — including documents. In practice, ensuring document accessibility can also be supported by AI-based tools such as Aidapta, which help automatically adapt digital documents to applicable standards.

Conformance with WCAG principles at specific levels means that a product is accessible to most people.

Why do we need to care about accessibility?

Since 28 June 2025, the so-called Polish Accessibility Act has been in force in Poland: the Act of 26 April 2024 on ensuring that certain products and services offered by economic operators meet accessibility requirements. Accessibility regulations now apply not only to public institutions, but also to businesses and the products and services they offer.

This means that the obligation to ensure accessibility applies, among other things, to:

• banking,
• e-commerce,
• transport,
• telecommunications services,
• websites and mobile applications.

Accessibility also applies to physical products:

• electronic devices,
• payment terminals,
• e-book readers,
• computers and smartphones,
• electronic communications equipment.

How do you implement accessibility?

Many product teams think about accessibility only at the end of a project. That is definitely too late.

Accessibility should be considered from the planning stage of a product and new features. It is a process that requires a plan, time, knowledge, and resources. When creating a product, we need to take into account the specific guidelines that apply to it — for example, banks must meet Level AA criteria. Many people mistakenly think accessibility is only about code.

It is a process that involves many roles in a project team:

• Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Team Leads, and Analysts create project success criteria.

• UX designers, UI designers, UX Researchers, and UX Writers design and research user experiences, from interactions and components to content and usability.

• Front-End and Back-End Development teams are responsible for implementing and operating the entire system architecture, both the user-facing layer and the technical back end.

• QA testers test the product manually and automatically, ensuring its quality and compliance with requirements.

Every one of these roles matters to the final product and is responsible for a different scope of work.

Why is it worth knowing accessibility principles?

For a company:

Knowledge of digital accessibility brings tangible benefits. It makes it possible to:

• create intuitive products,
• reduce errors during maintenance,
• increase market competitiveness,
• build a positive company image.

It is also worth remembering that implementing accessibility while creating new products and features is much less expensive than making corrections later.

For you:

• broader skills,
• greater value in the job market,
• the opportunity to work on more interesting, ambitious projects,
• the chance to specialise in a growing field,
• a lower risk of making costly design mistakes.

How do you get started?

Training is a good starting point: it helps organise knowledge and quickly understand what digital accessibility means in practice and how it benefits organisations and users. It is also the simplest way to gain the specific skills and tools needed to implement standards in everyday work.

1. Training: Fundamentals of Digital Accessibility

• introduces the creation of accessible websites, documents, and multimedia (WCAG 2.1 and 2.2),
• teaches the basics of assessing and implementing accessibility.

2. Training: Digital Accessibility and the WCAG Standard

• focuses on the practical implementation of accessibility for websites, applications, and documents,
• covers legal and technical requirements, as well as auditing tools.

Digital accessibility is not a trend or a passing fascination. It is a standard and a legal requirement that applies to most products and services. WCAG guidelines provide support and direction; they are not an obstacle or secret knowledge. They are principles created by people, for people — and that is what this is all about.