That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word accessibility. Most people think of doing without: grey boxes, beauty switched off, an obligation that wrecks your own design. For me it was the other way round, it drew me in.
For me, good technology always includes that everyone can use it, not just a fraction, but all of them. I can’t think for the person on the other side, I can’t control how someone perceives my site or whether all those visual effects work for them at all, so I leave them the choice. That, for me, is exactly where the difference between solid and excellent lies, not in the beautiful effects themselves, but in the question of whether, in the end, everyone really gets in. There are clients who book me precisely for that, and I simply don’t think it’s up to date any more to leave part of the population standing outside just because an animation looks pretty.
On my home page there’s an aurora effect where the heading blends with the glowing background. It looks gorgeous, and for a long time I absolutely wanted it exactly like that for everyone. The thing is, for people who don’t see well this effect is a real disaster, the type shimmers, the contrast tips over, reading becomes a strain. I sat with it for a really long time before I understood that I don’t have to choose between beautiful and legible at all, I can put both side by side.
Today anyone can turn the effects off with a switch, magic world on or off, and behind it isn’t some makeshift fallback but its own calm version that I genuinely love myself. And nobody has to land on the shimmering home page first and then go hunting for the switch: anyone who has already set their system or browser to reduce motion & effects gets the calm version automatically, the site reads that beforehand and adjusts on its own. There’s a lot of calm in it, clearly separated areas, large & easily readable type, nothing glares, and you always know where you are. A typeface like Inter looks great and still reads effortlessly, the one doesn’t rule out the other.
I also captured the whole thing in a short video, so you can see what I mean:
One thing I learned along the way is a small detail with a big effect: colours that look perfectly accessible often aren’t, and colours you’d never trust turn out to work flawlessly. It’s so close together that you can’t decide it by eye, you have to test it through, or at some point you just know. For me, by now, it’s the latter.
Underneath the surface there’s the same attitude. The site is built by hand, the menu is marked up as a menu in the code too, the buttons carry labels a screen reader can read out, right at the top there’s a skip link straight to the navigation, and everything can be enlarged. These aren’t grand gestures, it’s simply done cleanly.
And who is all this for? For far more people than most assume. For blind & visually impaired people, for deaf & hard-of-hearing people, for people with motor impairments who can’t use a mouse, for people with cognitive or neurological conditions, from dyslexia to ADHD to the natural decline that comes with age. For the broken arm, the loud underground with no subtitles, the harsh sunlight on the display. And, this one is easily forgotten, also for people who don’t get on well with technology and would rather buy in a shop on the spot than online. According to Statista, around 84 million people live in Germany, at least 13 million of them with an impairment or disability, and probably more, because by no means every case is recorded. A rule of thumb from practice sums it up nicely: accessibility is helpful for everyone, necessary for about a third, and indispensable for around a tenth. And a temporary limitation catches up with every one of us sooner or later anyway.
What really bothers me is that many people don’t even factor accessibility in, because they believe their clients wouldn’t want to pay for it. Usually, though, it’s because they don’t see the value themselves and therefore can’t sell it, they only see the extra effort, which they find annoying. Yet the larger audience is the strongest argument there is, because building accessibly widens your circle instead of shrinking it. That isn’t always easy to get across, but it works, I do it all the time.
For the company that offers a site like this, there’s a very tangible value in it. It’s perceived as professional, nobody complains about the handling, and especially areas with older clientele like a doctor’s practice or a transport service win over people who would otherwise drop off, particularly when the online appointment booking is genuinely accessible too. On top of that comes better findability, because clean, accessible HTML is exactly what search engines & AI search read well, so fewer bounces, more enquiries and often fewer support questions as well. In public tenders, accessibility is increasingly becoming a requirement; whoever doesn’t meet it is out of the running. And anyone who offers it of their own accord stands out from all those quickly-handed-off standard sites that just had a site builder slapped on top, is harder to compare and can position themselves differently on price, too. The legal obligation almost just comes on top of all that.
And the market is surprisingly open. According to a study by Aktion Mensch and Google, four out of five of the most-visited online shops in Germany aren’t accessible, even though, according to Aktion Mensch, people with impairments actually shop online more often than average. So anyone who really implements it isn’t one of many, but rather the exception.
For the people who actually use the site in the end, the benefit is even simpler: they get in. They can do what they came for without struggling, and they aren’t quietly excluded.
What matters to me here is that accessibility is first something human and only after that something technical. The technical side affects search, which is useful, but it doesn’t replace the moment when a person who doesn’t see well walks through the site once and tells me what they can make out and what they can’t. To me everything is logical, after all, I built it myself, but that feedback is a completely different thing, and it’s the more honest one.
And nobody needs to feel overwhelmed by it. Accessibility doesn’t mean reading your way through every set of guidelines; above all it means learning a bit more and looking more closely. With existing sites in particular, it’s often enough to make them more accessible step by step, better contrasts, meaningful alt texts or a clearer structure. A little bit accessible is better than not accessible at all. But if accessibility is explicitly sold as part of the deal, then it should also be complete, and when it gets tricky, you bring in someone who really knows their way around it.
Building a beautiful design accessibly is, for me, the supreme discipline, and when it works out, you’re at the point where it really pays off. My bigger projects all carry it within them. It takes a bit more intuition & a little more patience at the start, but nothing turns ugly in the process, quite the opposite.
It just doesn’t have to be ugly. It only has to matter to someone that everyone really gets in.