Some of your visitors see your site differently than you do. Someone who is color-blind misses the difference between your red error message and the rest of the text. Someone who doesn’t use a mouse can’t get through your form with the keyboard. Someone who sees poorly has the page read out by a screen reader. Digital accessibility is about whether your site works for those people too. And since 2025 that’s no longer just good manners for many businesses, but required.
What WCAG 2.1 AA is, in plain terms
WCAG stands for the international guidelines for accessible websites. There are three levels: A, AA and AAA. AA is the level almost all legislation points to, strict enough to mean something, achievable enough to actually do.
In practice it comes down to a handful of things you’ll probably recognize:
- Enough contrast between text and background, so light grey on white doesn’t become guesswork.
- Everything works with the keyboard, not only with the mouse.
- Touch targets big enough to hit on a phone without missing.
- Images with a text alternative, so a screen reader can say what’s on them.
- A logical structure with clear headings, so read-aloud software can follow the page.
None of that is rocket science. It’s mostly easy to overlook when you see well yourself and work with a mouse.
Why it counts legally now
Two things come together. The Dutch Wet digitale overheid has required government organizations to make their sites and apps accessible for a while now. And since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act applies, a European law that widens the requirement to a large part of the private sector: web shops, banks, transport, e-books, and more.
Whether you fall under it exactly depends on what you do and how big you are, there are exemptions for the smallest businesses. Look that up for your own situation, because I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. But the direction is clear: accessibility is shifting from “nice to have” to “the norm”. And law aside, it’s simply a waste to shut out visitors who could have become customers.
How Claude includes it by default
In part 2 of this series the seven design skills in Claude Code went by. The trait that binds them: all seven take accessibility into account by default at the WCAG 2.1 AA level. It’s built in, not a separate option.
That sounds like a detail, but it changes when you think about accessibility. Normally the question comes last, once the site is done and you’re about to go live. Exactly the moment you no longer feel like it. Because it sits in every skill, it comes forward. Ask for feedback on your design and accessibility is already in the lens. Have an error message rewritten and readability gets attention. You don’t have to think about it separately, and that’s exactly why it goes right more often.
The accessibility-review skill in the spotlight
One skill is built for it: design:accessibility-review. It runs a full check and looks at, among other things:
- Color contrast: does every text meet the standard, or does light text vanish on a light background?
- Keyboard operation: can you reach everything without a mouse, and can you see where you are?
- Touch target size: are buttons and links big enough for a finger on a phone?
- Screen reader behavior: is the reading order right, and do images and buttons have a sensible description?
You don’t get a vague “mind accessibility” back, but a list of what’s wrong and where.
How to get your own site checked
Say you have a landing page that’s already online and you want to know where it stands. Here’s how you go at it:
- Open the project in Claude Code, or paste the code of your page into it.
- Ask: “Do an accessibility review of this page on WCAG 2.1 AA.”
- You get an overview of the issues, ranked by what weighs heaviest.
- Work through them and ask for the fixes: “Fix the contrast issues and keep my house style.”
- Run the review again to confirm it holds.
For an existing site without code, the same approach works via a screenshot or the separate parts. It’s not a replacement for a real audit by someone who does this for a living, but it gets the most common mistakes out in an afternoon. And that’s usually the difference between a site that shuts nobody out and one that quietly does.
The caveat
An automated check doesn’t catch everything. Software can measure whether your contrast is right and whether your images have a text alternative, but not whether that alternative is a sensible description instead of “image1”. Half of good accessibility is technique, the other half is judgment, and that second part stays human work. Anyone who thinks a green review means the site works for everyone is selling themselves half a story.
So see the skill as the first sieve, not the last stop. It catches the clear mistakes and gives you an honest picture of where you stand. For the real fine-tuning, and certainly if you fall under the law, you eventually have someone look along who tests it with their own eyes and a screen reader. But starting at the standard, instead of accessibility as an afterthought, saves you a lot and gives your visitors something right away.
This is part 3, the close of the series on designing with Claude. Back to the start? Read part 1 on Claude Design or part 2 on the seven design skills. Questions about accessible design for your own site? Email me at jeroen@sparkone.nl.