If someone asked us where to start with web accessibility, we would not send them to WCAG first. Accessibility is about people and whether they can actually use the thing you built.
So start with the real questions. Can someone get through your site without a mouse? Can they make sense of a form when the structure is a mess? Can they use your product with low vision, color blindness, captions, zoom, or a screen reader? Can they finish the task on their own, with no workaround and no one to call?
That is accessibility. Which is why the honest way in is through experience, not through a checklist.
Tools that let you feel it instead of read about it
1. AccessibilityLens
An interactive simulator built to show how people with disabilities meet the web: low vision, color blindness, keyboard-only navigation, dyslexia, and cognitive overload.
2. Funkify
A browser extension that runs sites through different impairments: blurred vision, color blindness, tunnel vision, low contrast, tremor, dyslexia, ADHD, hearing simulations, and keyboard-only navigation.
3. RGBlind
Good for showing how fast a color-dependent interface falls apart for people with color vision deficiencies, and how often meaning rests on color alone.
Then try the exercises yourself
- Use a site with no mouse.
- Zoom to 200 percent.
- Watch a video with the sound off.
- Fill out a form with bad labels, weak focus states, and broken error messages.
These are uncomfortable on purpose. They expose how much of what we ship assumes one default user: perfect vision, perfect hearing, steady hands, full attention, no memory load. Most products are quietly built for that person and no one else.
Simulators are a starting point, not the destination.
If you want to actually understand accessibility, learn from people with disabilities. Not as a final test pass, and not by watching from across the room. Bring them in early: in research, in design conversations, in testing, in the feedback loop.
No simulator replaces lived experience. A real user can tell you what it means to depend on zoom every day, to lose your place mid-page, to fight a checkout flow with a screen reader, or to give up on a form because finishing it was simply too much work.
Accessibility starts to make sense the moment it stops being a list of requirements to satisfy and becomes a question of who gets shut out, where, and why. That question is the whole job.
Curious where your own site shuts people out?
You can start before you ever open WCAG. Run a free scan of your homepage and get a prioritized, plain-language list of what is breaking the experience and what to fix first.
🔍 Run a free scan Talk to a human