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AccessibilityApril 26, 20263 min read

Advocating for
Accessibility Testing

I wrote this memo for a course assignment in Accessibility and Universal Design at Kent State University.

To
All AllTheHomes.com Staff
From
James Dishman, UX Researcher and Accessibility Point of Contact
Date
April 26, 2026
Re
Building accessibility into AllTheHomes: what we are doing and why

Our competitor was sued for an inaccessible site. That is a useful prompt. It is not our reason. Our reason is that more than a quarter of U.S. adults live with a disability, our site does not work well for many of them, and the result is customers we are quietly losing and lawsuits we do not need.

Accessible means usable by people with disabilities. It is not a setting we toggle on; if disabled users cannot use the site, it is not accessible, regardless of what marketing says. Universal design is the discipline of building one product for the full range of human ability instead of designing for an average user and bolting on accommodations later. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users and turned out to help anyone with a stroller, a suitcase, or a hand truck. The same logic holds online.

The standard is the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, organized around four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). It defines three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA); AA is the practical target. The legal frame is the Americans with Disabilities Act, with Title III applying to a private business like ours.

Why now

Three numbers. 95.9% of the top one million home pages have detectable WCAG failures, up from 94.8% the year before, reversing six years of small gains (WebAIM, 2026). That is the median home page, not a tail of outliers, and the trend is getting worse. More than 4,000 digital ADA lawsuits were filed in 2024, with e-commerce as the primary target; more than 1,000 of those defendants were running accessibility widgets that did not protect them (UsableNet, 2025). More than 1 in 4 U.S. adults (28.7%) live with a disability (CDC, 2024). That is a meaningful slice of our buyers, renters, and the family members helping them.

What accessible has to mean here

For the site and the iOS and Android apps, the floor is WCAG 2.2 AA across search and filters, listing detail pages, the map, photo galleries and video tours, account creation, saved searches, and contact and tour-request forms. Concretely: listing photos need meaningful alt text; map pins need a non-visual equivalent; address, price, and key listing facts must be programmatic, not only visual; the site has to be fully operable by keyboard with visible focus; video tours need captions and transcripts; and VoiceOver and TalkBack must be able to drive the full rental and purchase flow on mobile.

A good-faith effort beyond minimum compliance means publishing an accessibility statement, naming an owner (this role), keeping a public remediation backlog, and reporting progress quarterly.

How we design, build, and test from here

Automated tools catch only a fraction of issues. They cannot tell whether alt text is meaningful or whether a flow makes sense. Real accessibility takes three layers: automated checks, manual review, and testing with disabled users on their own assistive technology. Table 1 maps WCAG to our product.

  • Design: Accessibility acceptance criteria on every Figma file and design brief; AA contrast and target-size tokens in the design system; disabled-user personas drawn from research, not assumption.
  • Development: Semantic HTML by default; ARIA only when no native element does the job; ship keyboard-first.
  • Testing: axe-core or Lighthouse on every pull request; a manual screen-reader and keyboard pass on every new feature; quarterly moderated sessions with disabled participants on their own devices, with findings tied to backlog items and named owners.

We will not buy accessibility overlays. They do not work, and as the lawsuit data shows, they do not protect us.

I will publish a 90-day roadmap, the accessibility contact, and the public remediation backlog within 30 days.

Table 1. WCAG 2.2 principles applied to AllTheHomes
PrincipleWhat it requiresWhat it means for AllTheHomes
PerceivableInformation presentable in ways users can perceiveAlt text on listing photos and map pins; captions on video tours; sufficient color contrast
OperableInterface usable without specific input abilityFull keyboard control; visible focus; no time-outs on saved-search forms without warning
UnderstandableClear content and predictable behaviorPlain-language descriptions; consistent navigation; clear form errors and recovery
RobustWorks with current and future assistive technologySemantic HTML; tested with VoiceOver, TalkBack, NVDA, JAWS; ARIA only where needed

References

AccessibilityWCAGUniversal DesignStakeholder Communication