Evan Keller

Accessibility done right helps everyone. It's also just good business.

Accessibility is usually framed as accommodation for the few. Built as a quality discipline instead, it pays for itself in reach, search visibility, lower cost, and features you never planned for.

Accessibility is usually framed as accommodation for the few. The evidence says otherwise.

Curb cuts were poured for wheelchairs and promptly claimed by strollers, luggage, and delivery carts. Captions were built for deaf viewers and are now switched on in every gym and kitchen in America. One in four American adults lives with a disability (opens in a new tab), and everyone else borrows one by the hour: sun glare on a phone screen, a sprained wrist, a crying baby in one arm, a waiting room at 2 a.m.

A website built to the accessibility standard serves all of it. Contrast that survives glare. Keyboard paths that survive a broken trackpad. Headings that let a screen reader, or a person in a hurry, scan instead of read.

I’ve spent years building and remediating institutional websites, and this is the thing I most want decision-makers to understand: accessibility is not a checkbox you buy at the end. It’s a quality discipline, and like every quality discipline, it pays for itself in ways that have nothing to do with the reason you adopted it.

The dark mode story

Here’s my favorite proof, because it looks like a fashion story and is actually an engineering story.

When GitHub set out to fix its accessibility (opens in a new tab), one of the first jobs was boring: organize the colors. Instead of hundreds of hard-coded hex values scattered through the codebase, they rebuilt their design system on a structured set of color primitives with contrast requirements built in. That work resolved hundreds of color-contrast issues.

Then something interesting happened. Once every color on the site flowed from an organized, contrast-managed system, generating an entire second palette became tractable. Dark mode, dimmed mode, high-contrast mode, and themes for colorblind users all came from the same foundation. The feature everyone experienced as “GitHub got hip” was largely a byproduct of GitHub getting its accessibility colors organized.

We saw the same thing on our own site. We built our color system as semantic tokens with contrast verified at the token level, because that’s what accessibility discipline looks like in CSS. When we later decided to ship dark mode, it was days of work, not months, and it required no JavaScript at all. The palette flips once, in one place, and every page follows. Teams that hard-code colors face a rewrite; teams that organized them face a toggle.

The same logic runs through KS Labs, the products we build and run ourselves. Two of them work the way this site does. KS Labs A11y Audit, our accessibility and performance monitoring platform, and Airport Code Quest both follow whatever light or dark setting a visitor’s system is already using, without being asked. RampScope and ChronoMap stay dark on purpose, because they run on lobby displays and wall-mounted screens where that is the design rather than a preference to honor.

That’s the pattern worth internalizing. Dark mode helps people with light sensitivity and migraine triggers, and it’s easier on many low-vision users. It also drains less battery and looks great. Nobody has to choose between the accessibility benefit and the business benefit, because they’re the same work.

The business case, plainly

The market is bigger than you think. One in four adults, plus everyone in the situational categories: the parent holding a baby, the field tech in sunlight, the executive on a treadmill with captions on. Every barrier you remove widens the funnel.

Search engines and AI are your most demanding disabled users. A crawler can’t use a mouse. An AI answer engine can’t interpret an unlabeled button. The semantic structure that makes a screen reader work is the same structure search engines index and AI tools cite. As more buyers ask an AI before they ask Google, well-organized, well-described content is how you stay in the answer.

The legal floor is rising. For state and local governments, the Department of Justice’s rule under ADA Title II (opens in a new tab) makes WCAG 2.1 AA a legal requirement, and private-sector demand letters aren’t slowing down. But if legal exposure is the only reason on the list, you’ll end up buying an overlay widget, and overlays don’t make sites accessible. They make lawsuits arrive with screenshots.

Early is cheap, late is expensive. A contrast problem caught in a mockup is a five-minute fix. Caught after launch, it can mean reworking the palette. Accessibility is a design constraint before it’s a development task, which means the requirements phase has more leverage over the outcome than anything that comes after it.

It’s a quality signal. Two podcast episodes from The Ruby on Rails Podcast in the summer of 2024 made this point back to back, and it’s telling that one was aimed at developers and the other at the humans around them. Joel Hawksley (opens in a new tab), who worked on GitHub’s accessibility team, walked through the engineering side. Two weeks later, Hilary Stohs-Krause (opens in a new tab) covered the people side: plain language, readable writing, teams that accommodate. The throughline is the same. The practices that serve disabled users are the practices of teams that care about all their users. Clients can tell.

What doing it right actually looks like

Not a plugin. An industry has grown up selling a line of JavaScript that promises compliance overnight, and it does not deliver one. An overlay loads after the page does and guesses at what the markup should have said. It cannot know that an unlabeled button means “renew your prescription,” and it cannot rebuild a form that shipped without labels. It can only paint over the gap, in front of the people least able to afford a guess. The Overlay Fact Sheet (opens in a new tab) sets out what these widgets actually do, what they do with your visitors’ data, and what disabled users say about living with them. Read it before you sign anything.

You do not have to take my word for it. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million (opens in a new tab) over its claim that its accessWidget plug-in could make any website WCAG compliant. The complaint called that claim false, misleading, or unsubstantiated, and the final order bars the company from making it again without evidence to back it up. The Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection put it plainly: “Overstating a product’s AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive.” The same order covers the third-party articles accessiBe had dressed up to read like independent reviews, which is worth remembering the next time an overlay vendor forwards you a glowing write-up.

Not a scan at the end, either. The version that works looks like this: accessibility requirements written into design, before code. Mobile-first layouts, because working through a touch interface eliminates the hover menus, tiny targets, and drag interactions that are accessibility liabilities anyway. Automated checks wired into the development pipeline so issues get fixed while the code is fresh; automation catches maybe a third to half of real issues, and a human pass covers the rest. Real keyboard testing, because teams that design with a mouse ship sites that are polished for the mouse and broken for everyone else. And an owner after launch, because content teams add images and PDFs indefinitely, and conformance that nobody watches degrades.

Quality that is measured, holds.

That’s the whole argument. Accessibility done right is not charity, and it’s not insurance. It’s the same work as building a good website, done in the right order. The organizations that get this build sites that are faster, easier to find, cheaper to maintain, and open to every customer they have, including the ones they didn’t know they were turning away.

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