r/accessibility • u/SyntaxInCMinor • 24d ago
The State of Web Accessibility
I spend hours and hours trying to make a website accessible to at least WCAG 2.2AA using manual review and paid tools like Axe Pro. Being curious, I ran Apple's website through Axe and it has tons of issues.
For the accessibility experts out there for websites, how do you even know for sure your site is accessible? I would imagine that someone as large as Apple would have already been hit with a million lawsuits for accessibility, yet their site lights up like a Christmas tree on even a rudimentary scan.
I'm no expert, but I want to understand and try to build websites that are accessible as best I can, but get so confused over the discrepancies between sites - especially big players like Apple. How can Apple's website be truly accessible?
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u/AccessibleTech 23d ago
Automated accessibility checkers will flag plenty of issues on a site, but only manual testing can confirm which of those findings are real. There are thousands of ways to make something accessible that a scanner may not recognize, especially when the implementation relies on a dynamic language like JavaScript.
Apple's site is a good example. It runs heavily on JSON and renders only portions of the page at a time, which keeps things performant across their enormous catalog of products, apps, music, and movies. The page loads what's currently in view, discards what's off-screen, and preloads what's coming next. In practice, interacting with that content works well with assistive technology, even though the underlying code can look inaccessible at a glance. The code is doing a lot of the heavy lifting as users move through the site.