Website accessibility: the baseline worth meeting
Accessibility is usually framed as care for users with disabilities. In practice it improves the site for everyone, including the person reading one-handed in bright sun.
Who it actually helps
Beyond screen reader users: people with age-related vision loss, anyone reading a phone in daylight, older devices, and everyone whose images failed to load on a slow connection.
There is a side effect too — nearly every accessibility requirement is also a markup quality requirement, which makes pages clearer to search engines.
The baseline checklist
Sufficient text contrast, body text no smaller than 16 pixels, tap targets large enough for a finger, meaningful images with alt text and decorative ones with empty alt.
Form fields tied to real labels rather than placeholders, and form errors described in words rather than by a red border alone.
A half-hour audit
Run Lighthouse for automatically detectable issues: contrast, missing alt and labels, broken heading hierarchy.
Then manually: complete a key flow with the keyboard, zoom to 200% and check the layout holds, disable images and see whether the meaning survives. Automation catches roughly half the problems.