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.