Is Your Website Accessible? What Philippine Organizations Need to Know in 2026

A request for proposals that reached us from a university carried a single line under technical requirements: "The website shall be accessible to persons with disabilities." Nobody on their side could say which standard that meant, whether the several hundred PDFs on the old site were included, or how anyone would prove it at handover. The clause had been copied from a funder's template, and it was binding all the same.

That line is showing up in more briefs every year, and it deserves a proper answer. Nearly one in every eleven Filipinos aged five and over reports difficulty seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, caring for themselves or communicating. That is 8.47 million people in the 2020 census, before you count anyone squinting at a cracked screen in afternoon glare. A website that only works for the visitor with sharp eyesight, a mouse and a quiet room is turning away a large audience at the door.

This guide covers what "accessible" means in practice, what Philippine law does and does not require, which standard to ask for, and how to check your own site before someone else's procurement officer does.

What does "accessible" actually mean?

The working definition comes from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, maintained by the W3C. Everything sits under four principles. Content has to be perceivable, so people can take it in through at least one sense. Operable, so it works with a keyboard or a screen reader and not only a mouse. Understandable, so language and behavior are predictable. And robust, so it keeps working across browsers and assistive technology.

In practice that comes down to a short list of habits. Text with enough contrast against its background. Images that carry a written description for people who cannot see them. Every control reachable from a keyboard. Captions on video. Forms whose fields have visible labels and whose error messages say what went wrong and where. Headings that describe the structure of the page rather than decorate it. None of these need special equipment. Most are decisions made in the first week of a project, which is why building them in is cheap and retrofitting them is not.

Is web accessibility required by law in the Philippines?

The answer depends on who you are.

If you are a government body, yes. The Magna Carta for Persons with Disability, Republic Act 7277, set the principle in 1992: equal access to information and communication. The operative rule for websites came in 2017. DICT Memorandum Circular 004, series of 2017, adopted WCAG 2.0 as the Philippine standard and directed national agencies, state universities and colleges, government corporations and local government units to comply, with two years allowed for existing sites. That window closed in 2019. If you run a public-sector site today, conformance is an obligation you already carry.

If you are a private organization, not yet by statute. No Philippine law today obliges a company's website to meet WCAG. There is a bill that would change that. House Bill 1026, filed in July 2025 in the 20th Congress, would extend the Accessibility Law, which currently covers buildings and transport, to information and communication technology, and would apply it to private establishments that serve the public. It is pending. It is worth knowing about, because that is where things are heading.

If you sell to Europe, yes, since June 2025. The European Accessibility Act has been enforced since 28 June 2025 and applies to any business providing covered services to consumers in the EU, wherever it is headquartered. Micro-enterprises with fewer than ten staff and under two million euros in turnover are exempt. An online store or booking service with European customers is not.

There is a fourth answer that is not legal at all. Universities, development agencies and international nonprofits increasingly write accessibility into their vendor requirements, because their funders write it into theirs. In practice, that clause reaches a Philippine business well before any law does.

Which standard should you ask for?

Ask for WCAG 2.2 at Level AA.

WCAG has three conformance levels. Level A is the floor. Level AA is what laws and procurement policies around the world actually cite, and it is the level at which a site becomes genuinely usable rather than technically passable. Level AAA is aspirational and not realistic for every page.

The version number matters less than people expect. WCAG 2.2 was published in October 2023 and became an ISO standard in 2025. It carries forward the criteria of 2.0 and 2.1 and adds a handful of new ones, mostly about focus visibility and target sizes. The DICT circular names 2.0 because that was current in 2017, and a site that meets 2.2 AA satisfies it. WCAG 3 exists only as an early draft, so there is no reason to wait for it.

What do most websites get wrong?

The same six things, year after year. WebAIM's February 2026 analysis of the world's top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9 percent of them, averaging 56 errors per page. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9 percent of pages. Missing image descriptions on 53.1 percent. Unlabeled form fields on 51 percent. Empty links on 46.3 percent, empty buttons on 30.6 percent, and a missing page language on 13.5 percent. Those six categories account for 96 percent of all errors found, and they have led the list for seven years running.

Philippine sites add a few habits of their own. Announcements published only as PDFs or scanned images. Posters designed for Facebook and uploaded as the whole news item, with the text baked into the picture. Carousels that move on their own and cannot be paused. Videos without captions. All of these are fixable, and most of them are content decisions rather than engineering ones.

How do you check your own site in fifteen minutes?

You do not need an auditor for a first look. Five checks will tell you where you stand.

• Run an automated scan. Lighthouse is built into Chrome under the developer tools, and the axe browser extension is free. Either finds the mechanical failures in a minute.
• Put the mouse away. Press Tab repeatedly from the top of the page. Can you see where you are at every step? Can you open the menu, reach every link and submit the contact form? If focus vanishes or gets trapped, a keyboard user is stuck there too.
• Zoom to 200 percent. Text should reflow rather than overlap or slide off the edge. Many older visitors already browse this way.
• Turn on the screen reader on your phone. VoiceOver on iPhone and TalkBack on Android are already installed. Listen to your homepage and try your contact form. You will hear an image described as "IMG_4471" within the first minute.
• Open your most important PDF. If the text cannot be selected, it is a picture, and it is invisible to assistive technology and to search engines alike.

We ran the automated pass on dthree.com.ph while writing this. Contrast passed on every page tested, which would not have been true two weeks earlier: the team roster on our homepage had measured 2.48 to 1 against the AA minimum of 4.5 to 1 until it was corrected in early September. The remaining findings were smaller and instructive: a footer logo link with no accessible name, a skip link that keyboard users could not reach, and a search control whose spoken label did not match its visible text. Scores of 95 to 97 out of 100, with three real defects underneath. A high score is a starting point, not a certificate.

Automated checks find what can be measured. They cannot tell you whether an image description is useful or whether the reading order makes sense. Those need a person, so a proper audit combines a scan, a keyboard pass and time with a screen reader.

Does accessibility change the cost or the timeline?

Built in from the start, very little. Contrast gets decided with the palette, keyboard access with the components, and captions and image descriptions are handled with the rest of the content. On a standard company site delivered in eight to sixteen weeks, accessibility is folded into design and testing rather than added as a phase.

Retrofitting is expensive because the problems sit in the foundations. A brand palette that fails contrast has to be revisited on every page. A carousel with no keyboard support is usually replaced rather than patched. If an existing site fails badly enough, remediation starts to look like a rebuild at the professional tier of our cost guide, and it is worth deciding honestly which one you are buying.

One thing not to buy is an overlay, the floating widget that promises to make any site compliant with a single line of code. It cannot write a missing image description, label a form field or free a keyboard trap, and it does not make a site conform to WCAG. Anyone reviewing against the guidelines will notice.

What should go in your brief or RFP?

Five lines are enough, and they will change the proposals you receive. The university brief we started with would have been settled by them. If you are writing a brief for the first time, our guide to website briefs covers the rest.

• The standard. "The site will conform to WCAG 2.2 Level AA." That one sentence settles what accessible means.
• The scope. Say whether it covers the website only, or also the PDFs, videos and forms published on it. Documents are usually where institutional sites fall short.
• The evidence. Ask for a test report at handover and a short accessibility statement on the site. If a vendor cannot describe how they tested, treat that as your answer.
• The ownership. Name who writes image descriptions and captions for new content after launch. This is where accessibility usually slips.
• The method. Automated scan, keyboard pass and screen-reader review, on real devices. A Lighthouse screenshot on its own is not testing.

Where we stand

We design to WCAG on every site we build, and we hold our own site to the same fifteen-minute check as a client's, which is how the findings above surfaced and why they are on this month's fix list. The way we build now puts that work at the start, where it costs least: contrast is settled when the palette is, components are keyboard-tested before they are reused, and image descriptions sit in the content plan rather than after it.

We build websites. We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice. Where the law bears on your organization, particularly for public bodies under the DICT circular, work with counsel and read the circular directly. For everything else, the fifteen-minute check above is a fair place to start, and if it turns up more than you expected, we are glad to look at it with you. The fixes tend to help every visitor, not only the ones the guidelines were written for.