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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
Accessible design is good design that stops turning paying customers away.
For years accessibility sat in the same drawer as the CSR report, something to get round to later. That's harder to justify now. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, so if your business falls within its scope, accessibility is a legal question as well as a design one.
I'd still lead with the commercial case. The World Health Organization estimates that about one in six people live with a significant disability. If some of them can't book or buy on your site, they go elsewhere, and nothing in your analytics will tell you why.
Disability covers more people than most briefs assume
Some disabilities are permanent, like blindness. Others last a month, like an arm in a cast, or an afternoon, like glare on a phone screen at a bus stop. Design for all of them and the site gets easier for everyone.
Accessible markup is also tidy markup, with headings in order and real buttons, and search engines make more sense of a page built that way. If you tender for public-sector or larger corporate work, read the requirements closely: many ask for WCAG AA conformance, and falling short can count against you.
The failures a marketing director never sees
Most accessibility faults are invisible from a desk with a mouse and a large monitor, which is where websites get signed off. Contrast is the obvious one: pale grey text on white looks refined in a presentation and is hard work for anyone with weaker eyesight or a phone in daylight.
Forms and keyboard traps cost you enquiries more directly. A field whose only label is placeholder text loses it the moment you start typing, so people forget what was asked and some give up halfway. A keyboard trap lets you tab into a menu or pop-up but not back out, and the only escape is to leave the site. You can find these yourself: put the mouse away and try to send an enquiry using only the keyboard. If you get stuck, so does everyone who browses that way.
An overlay leaves the real faults in place
You'll have seen the little accessibility icon in the corner of some websites, sold as a quick route to compliance. Many accessibility and privacy advocates argue these overlays make things worse for screen reader users, by getting in the way of tools those users already rely on. Meanwhile the owner feels covered, and the unlabelled fields and the clickable div pretending to be a button stay in the code, which is where an audit or a complaint would look.
Accessible doesn't have to mean ugly
There's a persistent idea that accessible sites need neon colours and enormous type. Strong contrast and a clear typographic hierarchy are the foundations of Swiss Style, and nobody calls that work clumsy.
We build accessibility into the design system from the start. Colour palettes are chosen to meet the AA contrast level in WCAG 2.2 by default. Focus states (the outline showing where you are when you move through a page by keyboard) are designed as part of the brand. Plenty of sites strip them out entirely, which leaves keyboard users lost.
Retrofit or rebuild depends on what's underneath
If the build is sound and the colours are just too faint, a retrofit is mostly CSS work: relatively cheap, and it fixes a lot quickly. If the HTML itself is wrong, say clickable <div> elements everywhere a <button> should be, patching it can cost more than rebuilding it properly.
An automated score is where an accessibility audit starts
Automated checkers such as Lighthouse catch only a minority of issues, so a proper audit needs a person as well as a tool:
An automated scan for the easy catches, like images with no alt text.
The main tasks done with the keyboard only.
The same tasks again with a screen reader switched on.
Rules for whoever manages the content, so nobody uploads a PDF that's really a scanned image of text.
That last one gets overlooked. A site can pass an audit at launch and fail one months later because of what's been uploaded since.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Accessibility and website services · Education and research website design · Thomond Park website case study
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
Accessible design is good design that stops turning paying customers away.
For years accessibility sat in the same drawer as the CSR report, something to get round to later. That's harder to justify now. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, so if your business falls within its scope, accessibility is a legal question as well as a design one.
I'd still lead with the commercial case. The World Health Organization estimates that about one in six people live with a significant disability. If some of them can't book or buy on your site, they go elsewhere, and nothing in your analytics will tell you why.
Disability covers more people than most briefs assume
Some disabilities are permanent, like blindness. Others last a month, like an arm in a cast, or an afternoon, like glare on a phone screen at a bus stop. Design for all of them and the site gets easier for everyone.
Accessible markup is also tidy markup, with headings in order and real buttons, and search engines make more sense of a page built that way. If you tender for public-sector or larger corporate work, read the requirements closely: many ask for WCAG AA conformance, and falling short can count against you.
The failures a marketing director never sees
Most accessibility faults are invisible from a desk with a mouse and a large monitor, which is where websites get signed off. Contrast is the obvious one: pale grey text on white looks refined in a presentation and is hard work for anyone with weaker eyesight or a phone in daylight.
Forms and keyboard traps cost you enquiries more directly. A field whose only label is placeholder text loses it the moment you start typing, so people forget what was asked and some give up halfway. A keyboard trap lets you tab into a menu or pop-up but not back out, and the only escape is to leave the site. You can find these yourself: put the mouse away and try to send an enquiry using only the keyboard. If you get stuck, so does everyone who browses that way.
An overlay leaves the real faults in place
You'll have seen the little accessibility icon in the corner of some websites, sold as a quick route to compliance. Many accessibility and privacy advocates argue these overlays make things worse for screen reader users, by getting in the way of tools those users already rely on. Meanwhile the owner feels covered, and the unlabelled fields and the clickable div pretending to be a button stay in the code, which is where an audit or a complaint would look.
Accessible doesn't have to mean ugly
There's a persistent idea that accessible sites need neon colours and enormous type. Strong contrast and a clear typographic hierarchy are the foundations of Swiss Style, and nobody calls that work clumsy.
We build accessibility into the design system from the start. Colour palettes are chosen to meet the AA contrast level in WCAG 2.2 by default. Focus states (the outline showing where you are when you move through a page by keyboard) are designed as part of the brand. Plenty of sites strip them out entirely, which leaves keyboard users lost.
Retrofit or rebuild depends on what's underneath
If the build is sound and the colours are just too faint, a retrofit is mostly CSS work: relatively cheap, and it fixes a lot quickly. If the HTML itself is wrong, say clickable <div> elements everywhere a <button> should be, patching it can cost more than rebuilding it properly.
An automated score is where an accessibility audit starts
Automated checkers such as Lighthouse catch only a minority of issues, so a proper audit needs a person as well as a tool:
An automated scan for the easy catches, like images with no alt text.
The main tasks done with the keyboard only.
The same tasks again with a screen reader switched on.
Rules for whoever manages the content, so nobody uploads a PDF that's really a scanned image of text.
That last one gets overlooked. A site can pass an audit at launch and fail one months later because of what's been uploaded since.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Accessibility and website services · Education and research website design · Thomond Park website case study
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.