Web and email accessibility isn't optional anymore

On 30 July 2026 I spoke at WordPress Meetup Porto about a subject I have found myself dealing with many times throughout my career: digital accessibility. The talk was billed in Portuguese as A acessibilidade Web e no email já não é opcional.

What the talk covered

Digital accessibility means designing and building products that can be used by as many people as possible, whatever their abilities or the circumstances they find themselves in. The guidelines and standards we use to do that apply mainly to websites, emails and apps.

In the talk I went through those scenarios, focusing in particular on web and email and trying to keep the session as practical as possible: the problems developers run into most often, real examples from live sites and HTML code, how AI can help along the way, and which tools we have to audit and fix any issues we find.

The main points I hope stuck with the audience are these:

Accessibility = inclusion. Have you ever browsed a low-contrast site with your screen brightness turned down? You do not need a visual impairment to end up somewhere where something “cannot quite be read”. The barriers our users meet can be permanent, temporary, or simply down to the situation they are in. Designing and building an accessible product means making it usable by more people, in more situations.

Accessibility does not mean giving up on design. There are websites and emails that prioritise design while completely overlooking accessibility, making the experience difficult or unpleasant for their audience. I do not think the answer is the opposite extreme either, sacrificing a good visual experience in the name of accessibility. A beautiful site can be accessible, and an accessible site can be beautiful: the goal is to find the right balance between the two.

Build it in, don’t bolt it on. Designing and building an accessible digital product from the start is generally simpler and cheaper than trying to make it accessible after the fact. Keeping these principles in mind during design and development avoids many of the problems that would otherwise call for audits, corrective work and fixes that are often awkward to implement.

Why now

Over the past few years accessibility has gone from being seen as a “nice-to-have” to something developers and businesses can no longer afford to ignore. With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) applicable since 2025, and accessibility enforcement beginning to take shape across Europe, it felt like the right moment to explore the subject in a practical way, focusing on the two areas I know best: the web and email.

The presentation

If you cannot see the slides above, download them as a PDF.

The tools I recommended

These are the tools I recommended, and that I often use myself:

Websites: axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse, Ally, Accessibility Checker, WP Accessibility
Email: AccessiMail, Litmus, Email on Acid, Parcel, Can I Email
Screen readers and colour: NVDA, VoiceOver, Colour Contrast Analyser

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took part and joined the discussion. Spending time with the WordPress Porto community is always a pleasure.

Every month, someone talks about something interesting, so if you are anywhere nearby I would suggest taking a look at the WordPress Meetup Porto page and signing up.

See you at the next one!