This is the family most owners already half-know. Every image that carries meaning needs a short text description — alt text — so a screen reader can say what it shows. Text has to hold up against its background; thin grey type on a white card is the classic fail. People need to be able to enlarge text without the layout falling apart, and video with spoken content needs captions. Two pieces of this family are the only parts Ontario leaves out: live captions on live video (SC 1.2.4) and audio descriptions for pre-recorded video (SC 1.2.5). Everything else here applies.

Plenty of people never touch a mouse — they drive the whole web with a keyboard, a switch, or a screen reader. So every link, button, menu and form field has to work with the Tab and Enter keys alone, in an order that makes sense as you move down the page. There has to be a visible marker showing where the keyboard is focused right now, and no spot that traps someone so they cannot Tab back out. A skip-to-content link at the top saves people from tabbing through your whole menu on every single page.

Every form field needs a label that is actually tied to it in the code, not just grey placeholder text that disappears the moment you start typing. When someone fills something out wrong, the error has to say what to fix in plain words, not just turn the box red. Menus and layout should stay consistent from page to page so people are not relearning the site each time — and the page language should be set in the code, so a screen reader reads French as French and English as English.

This is the plumbing. Pages have to be built with clean, valid markup so assistive technology — screen readers, voice control, braille displays — can read the structure underneath. Custom widgets you build yourself, like a fancy dropdown, a slider or a modal, have to tell that technology what they are, what state they are in, and what they are called. Get this wrong and a screen reader just meets an unlabelled blob. Robust is the family that keeps your site working as browsers and assistive tools keep changing.

An automatic scan is genuinely useful, and it is the right first move. It reliably catches the machine-checkable failures across all four families: missing alt text, thin contrast, form fields with no label, a page with no language set, broken markup. Deque's 2021 study found automated testing covers about 57% of accessibility issues by volume. The flip side of that number is just as honest — a scanner cannot tell whether your alt text actually describes the picture, whether the keyboard order makes sense, or whether an error message truly helps. That part needs a person. A good scan reports both: what it found, and roughly how much is left for human review.

The fastest way to turn all of this from abstract into a plain to-do list is to run the free scan. It checks your site against WCAG 2.0 AA, flags the machine-detectable problems across the four families, and tells you plainly how much is likely left for a human to look at. In WebAIM's 2026 survey, 95.9% of home pages had automatically detectable errors — so most sites have something to fix, and knowing your number beats guessing. Takes about ten minutes, and there is no account to make.