How accessibility changed the way I write and create content

Our Accessibility Team are really passionate about what they do and the difference it makes, so I quickly had to start learning about and applying accessibility it in practice.

William and the team have been hugely supportive over the years, but it also takes deliberate effort. Accessibility doesn’t just happen in the background - especially in marketing. It shows up in all the small decisions you make every time you write something, design something, or hit publish.

It starts with how people experience content

One of the biggest shifts for me has been understanding that content isn’t experienced in one fixed way. It isn’t just what something looks like on a screen, it’s also how poeple move through it. 

Skip links that let you jump straight to content instead of tabbing through everything. Heading structures that act like navigation, not just visual hierarchy. And link text that still makes sense out of context or when read aloud by a screen reader. These all change how someone experiences what we create.

Once you start thinking about that, you stop seeing pages as visual layouts and start seeing them differently as structures people move through. That’s changed how I write and create content. I think more about scanning, flow, and whether someone can actually reach what they need without friction.

Writing for how people really use things

It’s also made me a lot more intentional about clarity - especially in our copy.

I care less about clever wording and more about whether something is actually clear when it’s taken out of context, like a link in a blog post, or a CTA read on its own. 

On social media, for example, people might never see the design or the surrounding context. Alt text and video descriptions stop being “additional settings” and become part of the actual content. That shift has made me think differently about what we’re really producing when we publish something.

Structure is often what people are interacting with

It’s also changed the file types we use internally. We’ve moved away from PDFs where we can. We've shifted our Statement of Work and other key documents towards more accessible Word document formats that are easier to navigate, update, and adapt.

That shift came from understanding accessibility isn’t just visual design, it’s structure, reading order, and whether content still works outside a fixed visual layout.

Building it into how we work 

As we worked on our rebrand and website build, accessibility wasn’t something added at the end. We had regular design reviews and accessibility audits as things changed, with plenty of conversations around contrast, layout, and motion. And yes - a fair amount of debate about what should and shouldn’t make it into the final design.

We also revisit things regularly because accessibility issues rarely appear as big obvious problems. They creep in through small changes. A link label here. A content tweak there. Easy to miss unless you’re actively looking.

Still learning and asking questions

I’m still learning and asking a lot of questions along the way - but that feels like the point. Accessibility isn’t something you finish, it’s something you keep doing as you go, especially in marketing where things move quickly and it’s easy to fall into a “just get it out” mindset.

That’s probably the biggest change for me.

Not just understanding accessibility but seeing how often it quietly shapes the experience we’re creating - whether we mean it to or not.

About Zoonou

Zoonou is a UK-based digital QA and accessibility company. Our Accessibility Team work closely with clients to make accessibility part of everyday delivery - supporting teams to create inclusive digital experiences that work for real users.