When you’re hiring, you want the best person for the job. But if you’re not considering digital accessibility in your recruitment process – let alone your job roles – you could be losing out on brilliant candidates. Here’s how to bake accessibility into the employee experience, so you can find, hire and keep the very brightest talent.

1. Online applications

Candidates can – and do – walk away at the application stage. Nearly a third of people with a learning disability have found it hard to apply for jobs due to inaccessible forms (Mencap, 2019). This isn’t about someone’s ability – it’s about a broken digital process, which leads to poor user experience, and lots of wasted time and effort. Some common problems include:

  • Time-outs: Where information isn’t entered quickly enough, or the network connection drops – losing all the information entered into the form.
  • Mouse dependency: Where the form can only be accessed with a mouse, making things impossible for people who rely on keyboards.
  • Hidden buttons: Where buttons to move to the next section of the form, or submit it, are ‘invisible’ to screen readers.

As an employer, working around these basic issues is the first step in making your recruitment accessible – and leads to a good first impression for candidates, too.

2. Skills tests

77% of employers test candidates’ skills (TestGorilla, 2025), often relying on these insights more than the person’s CV. Ironically, they’re considered a ‘fair’ way to measure someone’s performance or ability – yet few are designed with accessibility in mind.

One example is candidates using screen readers. These read text aloud, so the web page must be properly formatted and structured (take a look at our article, Seeing the Web Clearly, for more on how this works). If it isn’t, it becomes impossible to understand, navigate and even answer the test – and that’s before taking any time limits into account.

The lesson is simple: design web pages with accessibility in mind, keep tests in simple formats, and, if the job needs a specific tool or database, use the same one to test the candidate.

3. Job duties

The need for digital accessibility doesn’t end when someone gets hired. Using computers is part of almost every workplace – even if it’s just booking holiday or updating your personal details. If your systems, platforms and tools aren’t accessible, you could be hurting your own team’s productivity and engagement.

Sometimes, even smaller considerations can catch people out. Like a simple menu, with a drop-down list of options that appears when you hover the mouse.

  • Keyboard-only users might find it’s impossible to select an option.
  • Screen readers might not understand what to do next, if the options aren’t properly labelled.

With this in mind, always ask these two questions: Does the menu (or other feature) work with assistive technologies? And are all interactive elements (like form fields) properly labelled?

It’s worth remembering that if a digital tool is accessible to disabled people, it’s often more efficient and user-friendly for everyone.

Hire for ability

Don’t let poor digital design get in the way of hiring top talent. Instead, invest in digitally accessible design, and build the best workforce for your business. To get started, use our free snapshot tool to see how accessible your platforms are, or contact the team to run a full-scale audit: Accessibility-Services@Shaw-Trust.org.uk