What is accessibility?
Imagine being locked out of essential pieces of the digital world you rely on every day. Not because you forgot your password or your internet broke, but because the door you need to open wasn’t designed to let you in. This is the daily reality for millions of people with visual impairments and other disabilities.
Today, powerful screen readers and magnification software allow blind and visually impaired people to navigate the digital world independently. A person who is completely blind might use their keyboard to access key features like spellcheck or search. They might use simple touchscreen gestures on their phone or tablet to hear a webpage read aloud. Someone with low vision might use magnification software to enlarge text, enhance the contrast, or run both a screen reader and magnifier to spread the effort between ears and eyes. The technology works beautifully when websites and apps are properly designed. But despite long-established accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, nearly 95% of popular websites in 2025 don’t fully meet these requirements. Not because they can't, but because they won't, or they don't know where to start.
But I've never worked with accessibility before, what happens if I mess up?
We hear you, sighted human. Accessibility is hard to nail if you don't know what you're doing. That's why we've created accessibility.online for sighted and visually impaired people alike. We imagined a place where blind and visually impaired users have a voice, to make clear what works. We imagined a place where sighted people could ask questions, and get valuable answers. We imagined a place where everyone could find accessible apps and sites for themselves, their friends, their colleagues and or families to use. We imagined a place where accessible tools were showcased above everything else, and inaccessible solutions were only given attention when they picked up their game. Then we stopped imagining, and started building.
What we're doing
Many of the most common accessibility barriers are issues that could be fixed within a day. Adding alt text to images and icons allows screen reader users to identify them. Using proper colour contrast between text and background helps visually impaired users read and navigate without eye strain. These small tweaks take minutes to fix, and make a huge difference.
So we built accessibility ratings, a tool to let our blind and visually impaired members (our VIPs) report on how sites and apps are doing in these areas. VIPs can answer targetted questions that help us understand what is working, and what isn't about an app or site, and we turn their answers into a community-driven accessibility score.
Major blunders or higher effort tasks, will impact scores much more than quicker fixes like image descriptions and content labels. This way, we plan to give developers an insentive to implement quick fixes as soon as they can, without leading them to believe this is all that's needed.
Both VIPs and Allies (sighted members) will be able to see the accessibility scores submitted by our VIPs, and all membership income will go towards taking accessibility mainstream.
Wait, this isn't free?
We tried to make it free, but we can't without sacrificing accountability. We want to answer to members, not corporations or governments. We want independence, so we ask you to please pay what you can before using what we've built. The state of accessibility is worse than it has ever been. The majority of us have never had a job, and those of us who end up landing one cite huge accessibility barriers which are a pain at best, and career-ending at worst.
In return, we will use membership revenue to build the community, build products that break barriers, and raise awareness. Ratings is just one thing we have in mind. We've dedicated countless hours and all our passion to creating Accessibility Online, because we believe Accessibility for all is worth it.
How can you trust us?
We, Accessibility Online, are a community interest company, (Company Number 14849073) set up for the benefit of the visually impaired community. There are no shares in issue, so directors can't take out profits as dividends. Each year, we are required to publish a community interest statement, and unlike Companies House's own templates you can bet we'll make it accessible, so members can hold us accountable. Simply put, we cannot be bought, sold, or bartered. Our entire purpose is to serve the visually impaired community, raise awareness of accessibility, and break boundaries that have held us back for generations. If we break this promise, we might as well pack our bags, give up and go home.
What happens if this doesn't work?
That's a question that still keeps us up at night. Believe it or not, we just want an easy life, where we don't have to fight on the daily to keep our own technology from locking us out. We're building Accessibility Online to be a place where sighted and visually impaired people are equals, where discussions can happen, awareness and understanding spreads, and we all finally get a future where even losing the sight you've got is barable, because we all put the foundations in place while we could. If you never try, you'll never know. Are you in?