Designing for 100%: the case for accessibility-first thinking.

I've remediated thousands of inaccessible PDFs. Every single one of them cost more — in time, in money, in frustration — than it would have cost to build accessibly from the start. This isn't a guess. It's the math of every accessibility budget I've ever seen.

## The 80/20 of accessibility

About 80% of accessibility wins come from decisions made in the first hour of a project. Heading structure. Color choices. Alt text discipline. Reading order. These are not technical concerns — they're design decisions that happen to have technical consequences.

The remaining 20% — tagging, ARIA, complex tables — can absolutely be done well after the fact. But the 80% almost never can. By the time someone realizes the report is inaccessible, those decisions are baked into the layout, the brand, the production schedule.

Accessibility is not a feature you add. It's a constraint you design within from the start.

## Who benefits when you design accessibly

Screen reader users (the obvious case)

People with low vision who use zoom or high contrast

Users in low-bandwidth environments where images don't load

Anyone trying to read your document on a phone in bright sunlight

Future you, when the same content needs to be reused six different ways

That last one is the hidden gift. Accessible documents are also reusable documents. The structure that helps a screen reader is the same structure that lets you extract content for a website, a translation, a summary. Inaccessibility is technical debt.

## Where to start

If you take one thing from this post: review your last three publications and ask whether someone using a screen reader would understand them. If you don't know how to test that, learn. Or hire someone who already knows. The investment pays back faster than you'd expect — and your audience grows in ways you'll only notice later.