Accessibility Is About Intent, Not Just Compliance
Discussions about digital accessibility often center on the nuts and bolts of implementation: which ARIA attributes to use, what contrast ratio is sufficient, and how to structure semantic HTML. Less frequently discussed is the underlying philosophy — the why that motivates all those technical decisions. The phrase "equivalent experience" captures that philosophy in a concise way. It signals that accessibility isn't a checklist to be satisfied, but a commitment to preserving the purpose of every feature, piece of content, and interaction for the widest possible range of people.
An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately designed and built to account for the many different ways people interact with technology — and for the barriers that make those interactions difficult or impossible. While our industry tends to default to thinking about the how of creating digital products, understanding the lived experiences of disabled people is essential context for proper implementation. This article defines what equivalence means; a follow-up will cover practical techniques for implementing it.
Confronting Our Design Defaults
Despite living in a multi-device world full of smartphones, AR, voice assistants, and sensor technology, the default profile of the "typical" user — and typically the people building the product — still aligns with a narrow set of assumptions:
- Visual and large-screen,** with a fast connection and powerful hardware
- Male, white, and wealthy
- Young, Western, and technologically literate
- Able-bodied
Those assumptions reflect biases baked into industry norms. They may not be comfortable to read honestly, but examining who sits around you at work and whose needs are represented in daily workflows reveals how pervasive they are. An equivalent experience, by contrast, centers on the intent behind a product — making its meaning legible regardless of which device a user holds or what their abilities are.
What Equivalence Is Not
Sometimes the clearest way to define a concept is to show its absence. Consider a web app intended for the general public that does not have a mobile breakpoint:
People accessing that app from a small display are forced to pinch and pan to find anything useful. The burden — the extra cognitive and physical effort — gets placed squarely on the user whose only "failure" was choosing a smartphone. It is a safe bet the app looks excellent on the laptops and desktops of the people who built it, who never considered circumstances beyond their own.
"It has enough contrast for me" is the design equivalent of a developer saying "it works on my machine." That mentality communicates a quiet dismissal: you don't matter unless you fit our mold. If you have spent any real time on the web, you have likely felt that dismissal yourself.
This design gap is closely related to another serious accessibility issue we often overlook: fixed text sizes.
Preventing Zoom Is Excluding Users
Disallowing pinch-to-zoom or dynamic text scaling — a common behavior on native mobile apps — delivers an unambiguous message about who is welcome. A person with reduced vision is told, unless you have eyesight similar to the developer, your needs aren't our priority. It is worth remembering that aging brings vision changes to nearly everyone, and asking yourself whether your future self could use what you are building today is a useful check.
Technically Accessible Is Not the Same as Equivalent
Thinking of accessibility only as a set of requirements met can lead to experiences that work technically but are practically unusable. These experiences are like a DIY machine built to pass the pepper to a dinner guest — a convoluted route through weights, ramps, and counterweights to accomplish a task that should take a single hand motion.
Because accessibility violations are widespread on the web, assistive technology often includes a full suite of workaround features. Users discover actual barriers and then learn to arrange specific combinations of screen readers, magnification, navigation tools, and custom settings to bypass common obstacles. It works — eventually. But determining what tools are needed requires a disproportionately large investment of time and energy before a single interaction happens. A task as simple as clicking a button can cost a disabled person significantly more effort than it costs an able-bodied person, even when the button was built according to strict technical specs but without equivalence in mind.
The Real Costs of Poorly Designed Experiences
The toll is higher than lost time. This effort feeds back into the user’s overall health and condition. For someone with a motor impairment like arthritis, the repetitive strain of fixing another team’s poor design can make a fundamental interaction physically painful. Cognitive accessibility also matters here. Interfaces that assume specialized knowledge, a recent conceptual education, or a strong grasp of unfamiliar conventions invisible to novice users force a heavy cognitive load onto already taxed users. Poor interface design has consequences that go far beyond annoyance — there are documented cases of confusion in complex institutional systems leading directly to fatal outcomes.
Compounding and Chilling Effects
These stressors combine in ways that compound. Anyone familiar with the idea of "spoons," the finite amount of mental and physical energy a disabled person has to allocate each day, knows that each inaccessible experience removes resources needed for daily life. Worse, repeated blocked attempts push people to abandon services entirely. In the end, the failure to implement equivalent experiences causes users to internalize a product's deficiency as their own personal failing.
"Nobody has complained," some teams reason. But no complaints should be taken not as a sign of success, but as evidence that your users are frustrated — and have given up. The longer we build products that turn people away, the more people will stop trying to show up.
Access Needs Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All
Assistive technology is often reduced to screen readers in the popular imagination, but the reality is far broader. For many people, it means browser extensions that reshape the web to fit their needs. Damien Senger, a digital designer, uses an extension called Midnight Lizard to enforce visual consistency across sites. This helps them “to focus on the content directly and to limit having too big differences between websites. It is also helping me to avoid too harsh color contrasts that are really uncomfortable.” The problem isn’t always a single site’s design; it’s the cumulative cognitive load of wildly different layouts, type scales, and color schemes from one page to the next.
Senger also uses ad blockers “not only for ads but to block animations or content that are too distracting for my ADHD.” The ad industry’s lack of regulation means that animation known to trigger seizures, migraines, or attention issues isn’t moderated. For Senger and others, blocking ads is less about privacy and more about self-defense against content that can physically harm or cognitively derail them.
Kenny Hitt, a screen reader user since 1984, describes a common frustration: websites with ads that “essentially cause the site to constantly auto update. This prevents me as a screen reader user from reading the content of those websites.” When a page refreshes on its own, the screen reader loses its place and the user has to start over — a compounding barrier that makes some sites effectively unusable.
The Cost of Inaccessibility Is Real Business Loss
A lack of equivalent experience isn’t an abstract problem — it translates directly into lost revenue. Brian Moore puts it plainly: “there are web sites where I like their products a lot but won’t buy them because the site itself is such a struggle, and attempts to reach out have met with either silence or resistance to taking any action.” He cites the Fluance website as a recent example, where bugs in the shopping flow prevent him from purchasing high-end audio equipment — a site whose entire purpose is to sell products. When checkout is broken for a segment of users, it’s not a niche issue; it’s a direct hit to the bottom line.
The stakes extend beyond commerce. As government services digitize, inaccessible systems push people out of civic participation. Justin Yarbrough describes applying for an accessibility-related job with the Arizona Department of Economic Security: “The button to start the assessment was a clickable div. They wound up waving the assessment requirement for the position.” Jim Kiely’s brother “has stopped paying his water bill online because the city water website [doesn’t] work well with a screen reader and high contrast.” Others report being unable to submit résumés because job application portals were inaccessible. In every case, the failure isn’t the user’s — it’s the design’s.
Assistive Tech Use Is Dynamic, Not Static
Soren Hamby, a product marketing manager and design advocate, describes having “varying levels of vision so [they] tend to not always need the same level of accommodation.” Their assistive technology use is a shifting mix of screen magnification and screen reading, depending on the task and how well the interface meets their access needs. In grocery delivery apps, “the carts often only read the quantities rather than the item name. It’s much easier to order with a sighted person.”
The content of that complaint matters, but so does its consequence. For Hamby, relying on a sighted person for grocery ordering isn’t a convenience issue — it’s a blow to autonomy. The act of acquiring food is deeply personal, and being forced to outsource it because an app fails to read item names is an unacceptable barrier. The same logic applies to any product or service that forces users into dependent relationships because of poor design.
Accessibility Is a Legal Requirement, Not an Option
Companies ignore these issues at their peril. Winn-Dixie was successfully sued for maintaining a website that couldn’t be operated with a screen reader. The court found that because the grocery chain’s website was heavily integrated with its physical stores, it fell under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). More recently, the Supreme Court declined to hear Domino’s Pizza’s appeal of a lower court ruling, effectively establishing that preventing someone from using a site or app because they use screen reading software is unconstitutional.
The message from regulators is becoming clear. In the United States, there is now legal precedent for private companies to be sued for violating civil rights via inaccessible digital experiences. Europe and parts of Asia have similar frameworks. The irony for both Winn-Dixie and Domino’s: the cost of implementing accessibility fixes was far cheaper than the cost of litigation.
How You Respond to Bug Reports Matters
Accessibility problems are often treated differently from other software bugs — downplayed, ignored, or routed to someone with no power to fix them. Kenny Hitt describes the pattern: “When I run into accessibility issues nowadays, I’ll try reporting it, when I get the usual response from the feedback of the person not caring, I just give up and walk away. If [the response] comes from somebody in marketing who doesn’t understand accessibility, I just give up and go away.”
Brian Moore has a different experience when he can reach the right people: “Depending on who I talk to it ranges from ‘here’s what doesn’t work’ to all kinds of technical detail about why if I can get to the right people.” That distinction is key. Responding well to an accessibility report isn’t complicated. It means thanking the person, acknowledging the issue, identifying who will handle it, asking clarifying questions, offering workarounds, and involving the reporter in the fix process. Transparency about the bug-fixing process builds trust with a population that has historically been overlooked.
One note: assigning someone to an email address to perform tasks on behalf of assistive technology users is not a suitable long-term fix. It does nothing to address the underlying barrier and reinforces the kind of dependency that equivalent experiences are meant to eliminate.
Beyond Compliance: The Value Case for Accessibility
Legal mandates and civil rights arguments are one thing, but there's another compelling reason to take accessibility seriously: profit. The numbers here are not trivial, and they point to a market that the web industry has largely slept on.
The Click Away Pound Survey, fielded in both 2016 and 2019, examined the online shopping habits of people with disabilities. Its findings were stark: more than 4 million shoppers abandoned retail websites as a direct result of accessibility barriers. That translates to roughly £17.1 billion—about $21.1 billion USD—in lost revenue.
A separate 2018 study, The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities from the American Institutes for Research, puts the disposable income of disabled working-age adults at an estimated $490 billion.
Two takeaway points stand out from this research. First, the web is still a young medium, and its widespread use by the general public is a very recent development. Second, the general population includes a significant number of disabled people whose needs are going unmet by most digital products. Those unmet needs represent enormous potential revenue.
Complying with the ADA is by definition the legally required minimum for accessibility. It doesn't account for a good user experience, usability, and innovation. Unless you strive for the minimum all the time, compliance is not enough.
This is a massive opportunity, and the industry is only beginning to notice it. Rather than treating accessibility as a risk to be mitigated, this data suggests a better framing: accessibility is a lens for spotting future business opportunities.
Accessibility as a Mindset
Accessibility is frequently treated as a box to check—a problem to solve rather than a perspective to adopt. Equivalent experiences demand that we question our assumptions and biases, forcing us to think beyond our own context. That can feel uncomfortable at first, but the goal is straightforward: make digital experiences usable for everyone.
Delivering equivalent experiences is both a responsibility and a privilege for those who build for the web.
Resources for Going Deeper
- “WCAG Primer,” Tetra Logical
- “The Web Accessibility Basics,” Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog
- “Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things To Improve Your Website Accessibility,” WebsiteSetup.org
- “The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing: Call The Professionals,” Eric Bailey, Smashing Magazine
- “Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance,” Dennis Deacon, 24 Accessibility
- “Videos Of People With Disabilities Using Tech,” Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab
- “Web Accessibility Perspectives: Explore The Impact And Benefits For Everyone,” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C
Thank you to Brian Moore, Damien Senger, Jim Kiely, Justin Yarbrough, Kenny Hitt, and Soren Hamby for sharing their insights and experiences.
