2025-09-18 · HTML
Catch common accessibility mistakes in your markup
Eight structural errors in landmarks, labels, headings, and alt text that screen readers trip over.
Introduction
A checklist ordered by how often it shows up in real audits, with the minimal HTML change that fixes each one.
Field notes
A few patterns we kept seeing while puttering around HTML problems:
- The simple version survived every refactor; the clever version didn’t.
- Documentation written during the work aged far better than documentation written after.
- The second time a problem shows up, it is already a pattern — name it.
A checklist you can steal
- The failure is reproducible with one command.
- The fix has a test that fails without it.
- Someone other than the author has run it on their machine.
Closing
Write the short version future-you will actually read. That is the whole trick.