WCAG Best Practices (02/11/2026)
I have been developing websites for many years and never paid much attention to specific guidelines. I coded in now obsolete ways like using tables for everything and old school practices. My sites are usually a simple design with basic images, but I didn’t think about the useability of them with people who have disabilities. I mainly focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and what the robots thought.
I ran a couple of my websites through a WCAG scanner from PowerMapper and found my obsolete code and practices were a major problem with WCAG.
What is WCAG?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are internationally recognized standards for making digital content accessible to everyone, especially with disabilities.
My problems were with obsolete code like using Cellspacing="0" and other similar attributes in my tables instead of using CSS. Other problems were with using the proper title and aria-label tags with images and hrefs. There were other issues due to laziness as some images didn’t have proper height and width properties. I didn’t utilize role attributes, and I had zero search capabilities and list goes on.
I spent the next several days optimizing my code (I still use tables, for now) and removed the obsolete code and moved it to CSS. I added the appropriate titles and aria-labels, sized my images properly, worked on layout shift, added roles and proper nav and updated my png images to webp and added searching capabilities.
I have made huge improvements and PowerMapper shows it. Most sites are 100% passing. There is one site that has an issue where it is out of my control. It is a ColdFusion issue, and I am treating it like a general risk where I am accepting it. I am in the process of using other scanners to find other issues as each scan is different but so far, I am very happy with the new results.
Will SEO be happy too?
Will I continue to receive emails that my websites have tons of errors and that they can fix them?
