You're staring at your website's accessibility audit report. Red flags everywhere. Your boss wants it fixed by Friday. There are some simple hacks thrown around in your team meeting that promise to solve everything with a few measly lines of code.
You get a feeling in your gut, "this seems too good to be true!"
Trust that feeling.
Simple hacks rarely fix long-term problems.
Here are four examples I've come across just this past week.
1. Colour contrast hacks
79.1% of home pages fail the WCAG 2 AA success criteria for low contrast test. You could just darken all the text or use high-contrast themes.
But this breaks when you don't consider the broader visual hierarchy. That's how you end up with websites that technically pass automated contrast tests but are visually chaotic and actually harder to navigate for everyone.
2. Keyboard navigation hacks
So you can't access some interactive elements with your keyboard. No problem! Add some tabindex attributes here and there and bingo bongo problem solved.
But without understanding focus management, you'll likely create confusing navigation experiences where your users get trapped in widgets or lose their place entirely.
3. Alt text hacks
Your boss says your images fail WCAG because they're missing alt text. Instead of thinking about writing appropriate descriptions for images, you add a generic alt text that includes the filename where there's no alt text provided. WCAG passes, boss is happy.
The problem is that bad alt text is often worse than no alt text. A screen reader user would rather skip an unlabeled image than hear "image of Screenshot 2025-09-23 at 10.05.36.png" for a chart about climate change.
4. Accessibility overlays
The biggest example has to be accessibility overlays. These plugins promise to "make websites fully accessible" with just a few lines of code. If you think it's too good to be true, it's because it is.
25% of all digital accessibility lawsuits in 2024 targeted websites using these overlays. Overlays aren't preventing lawsuits. They're attracting them. Not to mention they don't fix accessibility issues anyway.
Simple hacks address the symptoms that automated tools can detect, but they ignore the underlying user experience problems and process issues. These require deeper thinking and process design changes because they're long-term problems.
Simple hacks rarely fix long-term problems.