Accessibility Retrofitting

The process of modifying existing products, websites, buildings, or systems after the fact to make them accessible to people with disabilities. Retrofitting is typically more expensive, time-consuming, and less elegant than designing for accessibility from the start, often resulting in bolted-on solutions that do not integrate well with the original design. In web development, accessibility retrofitting involves adding alternative text, correcting heading structures, fixing colour contrast, and restructuring markup on pages that were built without accessibility in mind. The difficulty and cost of retrofitting is a key argument for adopting Accessibility First or Universal Design approaches.