Somewhere in America right now, a web developer is adding alt text to a decorative divider image that says 'decorative divider image,' feeling good about their WCAG compliance score, and shipping a navigation system so convoluted that a sighted user with a graduate degree and excellent motor control can't find the return policy without three wrong turns and a moment of genuine existential doubt.
This is accessibility in 2024: technically defensible, practically baffling, and optimized primarily for audit reports rather than actual human beings.
The Compliance Industrial Complex
The Americans with Disabilities Act's application to websites has created a legitimate legal industry around accessibility compliance. Lawsuits targeting inaccessible websites have become common enough that companies now spend real money on accessibility audits, remediation services, and overlay tools that promise to make your existing disaster of a website magically compliant with a single JavaScript snippet.
Those overlay tools, by the way, are largely considered useless by actual accessibility experts and the disabled users they're supposed to help. But they generate a compliance report, and the compliance report is what the legal team wanted, so everyone moves on.
This is the fundamental confusion at the heart of accessibility theater: compliance and usability are not the same thing. A website can pass a WCAG 2.1 AA audit and still be an absolute nightmare to navigate for someone using a keyboard, a screen reader, or honestly just a brain that processes information differently than the designer assumed.
The Great Navigation Disappearing Act
Let's talk about hamburger menus. Not because they're new — they've been around long enough to be considered a design classic, which is a depressing sentence — but because they've metastasized into something genuinely hostile.
The original hamburger menu was a reasonable solution to a real problem: how do you fit complex navigation onto a small mobile screen? Fine. Acceptable. But somewhere along the way, design culture decided that hiding navigation was aesthetically desirable on all screens, at all sizes, for all users, regardless of whether there was any spatial constraint that justified it.
Now you get desktop websites where the primary navigation is buried behind an icon that looks like three lines, or a dot, or an abstract geometric shape that a focus group somewhere decided was 'intuitive.' The navigation isn't gone — it's just hidden by default, because apparently showing people where things are has become a design faux pas.
For a sighted user with fast reflexes and pattern recognition built from years of web use, this is mildly annoying. For a user with cognitive disabilities, or someone who is new to the web, or someone who simply doesn't share the designer's mental model of where things should be, it can be genuinely disorienting. But it photographs beautifully in a portfolio presentation, so here we are.
Alt Text Written by People Who Have Never Used a Screen Reader
Alt text is one of the oldest and most well-understood accessibility features on the web. The concept is not complicated: describe what's in the image so that people who can't see it understand what it communicates.
What actually gets written, in practice, ranges from the useless to the actively misleading.
'Image.' 'Photo.' 'Screenshot.' 'Graph showing data.' These are real alt text values that appear on real websites operated by real companies with real accessibility policies. They satisfy the technical requirement that alt text exists. They communicate approximately nothing.
On the other end of the spectrum, AI-generated alt text has started producing descriptions that are technically accurate and contextually nonsensical — describing the color of a shirt in a product photo without mentioning what the product is, or narrating the visual composition of an infographic without conveying the information the infographic contains.
Alt text done well requires someone to think about what the image is communicating, not just what it depicts. That takes about fifteen extra seconds per image and a small amount of empathy. Both of these are apparently scarce resources in modern web development timelines.
The Infinite Scroll Accessibility Paradox
Here is a fun contradiction that nobody in a design review seems to have flagged: infinite scroll — the pattern where content loads continuously as you scroll down, with no defined endpoint — is simultaneously being implemented with ARIA live regions (a genuine accessibility feature) and creating navigation nightmares for keyboard users and screen reader users who now have to wade through an ever-expanding content stream with no reliable way to reach the footer, the navigation, or anything that isn't the next piece of content in the algorithm's queue.
The ARIA label says 'new content loaded.' The screen reader announces it dutifully. And the user who wanted to find the contact page is now three hundred posts deep in a feed they never asked for, with no clear path out.
This is the accessibility theater problem in miniature: a technical accommodation applied to a fundamentally inaccessible pattern. The label is accessible. The experience is not.
Competing Design Trends Are Making Everyone's Life Worse
It would be unfair to single out disabled users as the only victims of modern web design's more creative choices. The same trends making sites harder to navigate for screen reader users are making them harder for everyone.
Low contrast text — gray on white, light on light, the aesthetic choice of a generation of designers who apparently view legibility as a constraint rather than a goal — fails WCAG contrast ratios and also just makes text hard to read for anyone over forty, anyone in bright sunlight, and anyone who didn't sleep well.
Hidden navigation frustrates power users as much as novice ones. Algorithmic content ordering — where the page you see isn't organized by any logic you can learn or predict, but by a recommendation engine optimizing for engagement — makes it impossible to build the spatial memory that helps all users navigate efficiently.
Accessibility, done correctly, improves usability for everyone. This is not a controversial statement among people who study it. But the version of accessibility that's being widely implemented — the checkbox version, the compliance-report version — is a parallel track that runs alongside design decisions that make the experience worse, rather than a foundational principle that shapes those decisions from the start.
What Actual Accessibility Looks Like
It looks boring. That's the honest answer. Clear navigation that's visible by default. Text that contrasts enough to read without squinting. Buttons that look like buttons. Forms that explain their errors in plain language. Pages that work with a keyboard in the order that makes sense.
None of this is visually exciting. None of it will win a Webby Award. It will not generate case studies about 'innovative UX approaches' or get shared approvingly in design newsletters.
It will, however, allow people to actually use the website. Which, in a just world, would be the point.
But we're not in that world. We're in the world where the accessibility audit passes, the overlay widget is installed, and the checkout button is hidden inside a collapsible panel inside a modal inside a tab interface that requires JavaScript to function and doesn't announce its state changes to assistive technology.
The box is checked. The website is a disaster. These facts coexist peacefully, and nobody in the meeting is going to bring it up.