Building an accessible site with Wix Studio
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Accessibility used to be the section of the brief nobody read past the heading. That's changed.
Here's what "accessible" actually means, what the law now says about it in Australia, the US and the EU, and how we build to the standard without turning every project into a compliance exercise.
What "accessible" website actually means
Web accessibility has a real definition. The international standard is WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, maintained by the W3C. The current version is 2.2, published in 2023 and refined through 2025. It organises around four principles, usually shortened to POUR:
Perceivable — people can actually detect the content, whatever their senses look like. Alt text for images, captions for video, enough colour contrast to read.
Operable — people can navigate and interact without a mouse, without perfect vision, without fine motor control.
Understandable — content and interface behaviour make sense. No form that fails silently. No navigation that surprises you.
Robust — the site works with the assistive technology people already use, not just the browser your team tested in.
WCAG scores sites against three conformance levels:
A is the minimum (basic) level of accessibility conformance.
AA is the level every law below references as the practical baseline.
AAA covers extras — full video transcripts, stricter contrast (not worth chasing everywhere)
Accessibility is not only a legal question
The law is the reason web accessibility reaches the top of the priority list, but not the only reason it belongs there.
Captions help someone in a noisy share house. High contrast helps someone reading a phone in direct sun. Keyboard navigation helps someone with a broken trackpad. Clear form labels help everyone who has ever filled in a form badly designed by someone in a hurry.
Accessible design is, mostly, just design that was finished properly.
What the law actually says
Accessibility Standards in Australia
Here the legal foundation is the Disability Discrimination Act. It doesn't mention websites directly, but it doesn't need to — the question was settled more than twenty years ago. A blind man complained that the Sydney Olympics website was unusable, the Human Rights Commission agreed, and the ruling has stood ever since. If your website shuts people out, the law treats it the same way as a shop with no ramp.
Current guidance points to WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the minimum. Going further where it's practical — transcripts for videos, clear headings — is encouraged but not required. Australia also has its own standard, AS EN 301 549, which covers digital products in general, not only websites, and leans on WCAG throughout.
Accessibility Standards in the United States
The ADA has two parts that matter here.
Title II covers government websites: state and local agencies, public schools, libraries. They now have a hard deadline. Larger entities must comply by April 2027, smaller ones by April 2028. These dates were pushed back once already in 2026, so they may move again — but the direction is clear.
Title III is the one that touches private business. There is no official deadline. Instead, there are lawsuits. Courts have repeatedly said that a commercial website is a "place of public accommodation," the same way a shop or a restaurant is. Most cases don't reach a courtroom — they end in settlements, usually somewhere between five and twenty thousand dollars. Not enough to close a business, but not small change for most small ones either.
The standard almost all of these cases refer to is WCAG 2.1 AA. If you are building something today, aim for 2.2 AA — it covers everything in 2.1 and will stay relevant longer.
Accessibility Standards in the European Union
The European Accessibility Act is already being enforced. And it doesn't matter where your business is registered, if you sell to customers in the EU, it applies to you. Online shops are named in the law directly.
The technical standard behind it is EN 301 549, which is built on WCAG 2.1 AA (an update to 2.2 is coming). Penalties are set by each country and vary a lot — from tens of thousands of euros in some countries to close to a million in others. A non-compliant product can also simply be removed from the market. The first lawsuits have already been filed in France.
Where most websites actually fail
It is never one dramatic flaw, but a handful of small, repeated ones:
Text on backgrounds that fail contrast ratios the moment you check them properly
Images with no alt text, or alt text that just says "image"
Forms with placeholder text standing in for a real label
Buttons and links that say "click here" or "read more" with no context for what they do
Video with no captions
Interactive elements that can't be reached or operated with a keyboard alone
None of these require a redesign. They require someone to actually check.
How we build for it in Wix Studio
Wix Studio has a built-in Accessibility Wizard, and it does most of the mechanical checking for you. One scan flags heading structure problems, missing alt text, and contrast failures — site-wide and per page.
It includes an AI alt text generator for anything you've missed, and it separates what it can fix automatically from what still needs a human: descriptive link text, whether content still works at 200% zoom, whether autoplaying media has a pause control.
Automated tools catch most of the mechanical failures. They don't catch bad judgment, which is where the manual review list above still matters.
Our process at Olya Black
We check accessibility as we build, page by page. This way we catch issues early, before they carry through to the rest of the site — and we save time by not fixing the same problem repeatedly across similar content.
We run Wix Studio's built-in Accessibility checker on each page as we go. It surfaces what can be improved or adjusted, and we act on it in the moment rather than at the end of the project.
Where an accessibility fix would affect a design decision or change something visible to the client, we communicate it directly.
The bottom line
Web accessibility stopped being optional somewhere in the last two years, in three different legal systems at once. The good news is that meeting the standard and building a well-made site are, most of the time, the same job. Do the second one properly and you've mostly done the first.
If you're thinking about how this fits your broader online presence, it's worth reading how SEO and branding work together — an accessible, well-structured site earns on both fronts.
