Building websites for everyone means designing for the full range of human ability, not the confident, sharp-eyed, steady-handed user we tend to picture when we open a design file. That user is a convenient fiction. Real visitors arrive tired, distracted, squinting at a phone in bright sun, nursing an injury, or living with a permanent impairment. A study of cancer survivors published in July 2026 puts hard numbers to just how common those barriers are, and the numbers are a wake-up call for anyone who builds for the web.

Consider one of the study’s participants, a woman the researchers call Megan. She had always prided herself on remembering a person’s name after a single introduction. Then came a breast cancer diagnosis in her 40s, chemotherapy, and the brain fog that followed. She lost track of names, of keys, of her phone, and long, wordy instructions became a nightmare. More than two decades later she still struggles, and she describes feeling “somehow lesser.” Megan is one of millions of cancer survivors, and when she opens a website that buries its instructions in dense text, the design itself is what stands between her and what she came to do.

The numbers that should change how you design

Researchers Rachel F. Adler of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Devorah Kletenik of Brooklyn College surveyed, interviewed, and collected diary entries from 46 cancer survivors between the ages of 20 and 78. The impairments they reported were not rare exceptions. They were the norm:

  • 52% lived with anxiety or depression.
  • 48% developed fatigue after diagnosis and treatment.
  • 33% experienced cognitive difficulties, including the memory and focus problems often called “chemo brain.”
  • 30% had physical or dexterity impairments.
  • 15% developed visual problems.

These were not temporary setbacks for most people. More than 40% said the effects lasted for years, and one survivor still reported fatigue 29 years after a leukemia diagnosis. In a separate finding the authors cite, more than 60% of breast cancer survivors who had chemotherapy, radiation, hormone treatment, or surgery still experienced dysfunctions six years later.

This is not an edge case

It is tempting to file accessibility under “nice to have for a small minority.” The scale argues otherwise. There are more than 18 million cancer survivors in the United States, and roughly 70% of them report long-term functional limitations. That is nearly twice the rate of the general population, and it describes only one group among many. Add everyone living with age-related vision loss, arthritis, migraines, ADHD, low literacy, a broken wrist, or simply a slow connection and a cheap phone, and the “idealized user” turns out to be a small slice of your actual audience.

The most useful way to think about this is that impairments are not a fixed category of “other people.” They are permanent for some, temporary for others, and situational for nearly everyone at some point. A parent holding a baby has one hand. Someone in a loud train car cannot hear your audio. Design that works for the survivor managing chemo brain also works for the exhausted new parent and the commuter with a cracked screen.

What the difficulties actually look like online

The most valuable part of the study is that it maps impairments directly onto specific digital tasks. When participants tried to use mobile devices and websites, here is where they struggled:

  • 46% had trouble reading text.
  • 39% had difficulty following instructions.
  • 37% struggled to navigate websites.
  • 35% had trouble seeing images or icons.
  • 30% found typing difficult.
  • 22% struggled with scrolling or clicking.
  • 20% had difficulty hearing audio.

More than half reported being frequently distracted or unable to focus. Read that list again as a designer or developer and it stops being a health statistic and becomes a punch list. Every item points at a decision someone made in a layout, a font size, a form, or a block of copy.

What to do about it: design

The good news is that the fixes are not exotic. They are the fundamentals of good design, applied on purpose instead of by accident.

Start with reading. If 46% of your most motivated visitors cannot comfortably read your text, tighten it. Break dense paragraphs into short ones, use headings and bullet points so people can scan instead of wade, and set a generous base font size with strong color contrast so the words hold up in sunlight and tired eyes alike. The study’s own recommendations lead with exactly this: bullet points over walls of text, larger fonts, and high contrast.

The stakes here are not abstract. One man in the study lost money on a financial transaction because he clicked the wrong prompt while trying to read text that, for him, was simply too small. A single font-size decision turned into a real financial loss. That is what accessibility problems actually cost people, one quiet mistake at a time.

Then reduce the load. More than half of participants struggled to focus, so every extra step, ambiguous label, or surprise interaction costs you. Write clear, simple instructions. Where you ask people to make a choice, offer defined options rather than an open blank they have to interpret. Support meaningful icons alongside labels so a page can be understood at a glance, and never rely on color alone to carry meaning. Make navigation predictable and consistent from page to page so no one has to relearn your site as they go.

Finally, respect the body. Larger tap targets with space around them forgive shaky hands and thumbs. Zoom that actually works, forms that do not punish a mistyped field, and layouts that reflow cleanly when text is enlarged all serve the 30% who find typing hard and the 22% who struggle to scroll or click.

And when you can, test with real people rather than guessing on their behalf. The researchers behind this study make exactly this point: the most reliable way to know whether an interface works for someone with chemo brain, fatigue, or vision changes is to include them in the design process, gather their feedback, and codesign with them where possible. No amount of internal review substitutes for watching a real user meet your real page.

What to do about it: development

Design intent only survives if the code underneath it is built to carry accessibility, and this is where hand-built sites pull ahead of drag-and-drop page builders that bury content in nested markup. Clean, semantic HTML gives screen readers, keyboard users, and assistive tools a page they can actually understand: real headings in order, real buttons and links, real labels tied to real form fields.

From there, the development checklist is concrete. Every interactive element should be reachable and operable by keyboard alone, with a visible focus state so people can see where they are. Text should be real text, not baked into images, so it can be resized, recolored, and read aloud. Layouts should reflow to 200% zoom without breaking, honor a user’s reduced-motion preference, and expose the ARIA roles and labels that assistive technology needs where native HTML falls short. Voice input and output should work, since the study’s participants specifically asked for it. And because fatigue was the second most common impairment reported, raw performance is an accessibility feature too: a fast, lightweight site asks less of a tired visitor than a heavy one that makes them wait. This is exactly the kind of standards-first, custom-coded foundation our custom web development is built on, because accessibility is far easier to engineer in from the start than to bolt on later.

Why this is good business, not just good ethics

Inclusive design is the right thing to do, and it also happens to be the profitable thing to do. Accessible sites reach a larger audience, and the same choices that help impaired users, clean semantic markup, real text, clear structure, and fast load times, are the choices that help search engines and AI answer engines read and cite your pages. Accessibility overlaps heavily with SEO, which means the work pays you back twice. There is a legal dimension as well, since website accessibility claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act continue to rise. But the strongest argument is the simplest one: the study is a reminder that behind every metric is a person trying to book an appointment, read their results, or buy something, and doing it while managing more than the rest of us can see.

Frequently asked questions

What does “building websites for everyone” mean? It means designing and developing so people across the full range of ability, including those with vision, dexterity, hearing, and cognitive impairments, can use your site successfully. In practice that means readable text, clear structure, keyboard and screen-reader support, and forgiving forms.

How many people are affected by web accessibility barriers? Far more than most teams assume. In the 2026 study of cancer survivors, 46% had trouble reading text and 37% struggled to navigate websites. Beyond that group, more than 18 million U.S. cancer survivors exist, about 70% report long-term functional limitations, and millions more live with permanent, temporary, or situational impairments.

What are the easiest accessibility wins for a website? Increase font size and color contrast, break dense text into short paragraphs and bullet points, make sure everything works by keyboard with a visible focus state, use real text instead of text baked into images, and add clear labels to every form field.

Does accessibility help SEO? Yes. Semantic HTML, descriptive headings, real text, alt text, and fast performance are core to both accessibility and search visibility, so building an accessible site improves how search engines and AI tools understand and cite your content.

Is web accessibility a legal requirement? In many cases it is treated as one. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, businesses face a growing number of accessibility-related claims, and following the WCAG guidelines is the widely accepted standard for reducing that risk. It is best to treat accessibility as a baseline requirement rather than an optional extra.

Build it for everyone from the start

The survivors in this study were not asking for anything unreasonable. They wanted text they could read, instructions they could follow, and pages they could navigate without exhaustion. Those are the same things every visitor wants, whether they know it or not. If your website only works for the idealized user, it is quietly turning away a large share of the people it was built to serve. If you would rather build one that works for everyone, that is exactly the kind of site we love to build.