Accessibility: Our Journey to an Inclusive Web Experience

One year ago, my team and I embarked on a transformative accessibility initiative. This journey wasn't solely motivated by our growing understanding of accessibility's importance, but also by the upcoming EU legislation requiring all e-commerce web applications to meet accessibility standards by June 2025. In this post, I want to share our progress, the valuable lessons we've learned, and the challenges we've encountered along the way.

Our Accessibility Journey

When we first built our web app, it was a client-side rendered React application created with the traditional create-react-app. At that time, accessibility wasn't on our radar. Our priorities were solely focused on business features, and we didn't even consider SEO since our traffic came exclusively from third-party sources.

Everything changed when the European Union introduced legislation requiring all e-commerce businesses operating in Europe to have accessible web applications by June 2025. The regulation doesn't demand immediate perfection but requires businesses to demonstrate ongoing improvement and progress since their last accessibility audit.

This regulatory shift coincided with our growing awareness of how inaccessible digital experiences exclude millions of potential users. We realized that building for accessibility wasn't just about compliance—it was about creating a better product for everyone.

Our journey from an accessibility-blind team to advocates for inclusive design hasn't been straightforward, but it has transformed how we approach web development. Here's what we learned when we decided to make our web application work for everyone.

Writing Code with Accessibility in Mind

We now must write code with accessibility as a core consideration. This approach has compelled us to write cleaner and better programs, benefiting not only our users but also improving our development practices. Accessibility considerations have become a fundamental part of our coding standards rather than an afterthought.

Accessible code often follows best practices that improve overall quality: semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, proper focus management, and clear information hierarchies all contribute to a more robust codebase.

It's Not All About Cool Features

Impressive features like animations and interactive elements are exciting to build and can enhance an application. However, when engineering with an accessibility mindset, we've had to evaluate these features critically. Our first question is now always: "Can everyone use and understand this feature?"

We discovered that many of our animations and complex components weren't accessible at all. Our UX team worked diligently to find solutions that wouldn't compromise the user experience for anyone.

In several cases, we replaced complex components with simpler alternatives to improve accessibility. Surprisingly, these simplified interfaces often proved better for all users. The end result is an application that's more straightforward, less complicated, and universally usable—something I've come to appreciate more than our previous approach.

When Are We Done?

You might wonder when our accessibility project will be complete. The answer is simple: never! Accessibility is now an ongoing commitment integrated into our development process. We continuously improve existing features and ensure accessibility in all new components added to our application.

The accessibility initiative only ends when development of the application itself ceases. This perpetual focus has been tremendously beneficial for our team's growth. We've gained valuable knowledge while helping users who previously struggled to complete orders on our site. The EU accessibility requirements have ultimately pushed us to become better developers who create more inclusive products.

Conclusion

I haven't delved into technical details in this post—that will come in a follow-up article. My goal was to share our journey and perspective so far. I hope you find yourself in a similar position with your team or individual projects. Continued investment in accessibility not only helps others but can make daily digital experiences significantly better for many people.

Remember that accessibility isn't just about compliance; it's about creating technology that truly works for everyone. The improvements you make today could be the difference between inclusion and exclusion for someone tomorrow.