Technical
Website accessibility (WCAG) for Gulf sites: why it matters in Arabic
Ilyes Massoudi6 min readThe short answer
Accessibility means anyone can use your site: someone reading with a screen reader, someone who cannot distinguish colours, someone browsing one-handed in sunlight, someone whose fingers are bigger than your buttons. WCAG is the global checklist for that, currently at version 2.2. In the Gulf, government bodies require it of their sites, and for the private sector the reason is simpler: most of what the standards ask for is what makes an Arabic site readable on a phone for every visitor, which raises enquiries. Five checks expose most problems: colour contrast, Arabic font size and line spacing, alt text on images, keyboard usability, and button size and spacing.
What it means without the jargon
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a global list of standards that make a site usable by the largest number of people in the largest number of ways. Its current version is 2.2, with three levels: A, the basic; AA, which most authorities require; and AAA, the highest.
The idea most site owners miss: these standards are not only about disabled users. Someone reading your site in their car under the Riyadh sun needs the same contrast a visually impaired person needs. Someone holding their phone one-handed needs the same large buttons someone with a hand tremor needs. That is why meeting them raises enquiries from every visitor.
Why it matters in the Gulf specifically
- Arabic type is visually smaller than Latin at the same size and has marks above and below the line, so it needs a larger size and line height. Sites built on English templates violate this automatically.
- The phone is the first device, and one-handed use outdoors is common.
- Government bodies hold their sites and suppliers to WCAG-based standards, so a company that wants to work with them needs a site that meets them.
- Arabic screen readers depend on correct page structure more than English ones, because errors in text direction and order confuse them.
The five checks that expose most problems
| Check | What to look for | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Colour contrast | Light grey text on white, or white on an image | A contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for ordinary text |
| Arabic font | Small size, light weight, cramped lines | Around 17 pixels on mobile, line height 1.6 or more |
| Alt text | Images with no description, or a description like image1 | A short description of what is in the image, and empty for decorative ones |
| Keyboard | Can you reach every link and button by pressing Tab, and see where you are | Everything reachable with visible focus |
| Buttons | Small and crowded, or an icon with no name | Around 44 pixels, spaced apart, with a name for every button |
Add to those: headings in the correct order (h1 then h2 then h3), forms with labelled fields and clear error messages, video with captions, and the page language set in the code so a screen reader pronounces it in Arabic rather than English.
Recurring mistakes on Arabic sites
- Light grey Arabic text at light weight because it looks elegant.
- WhatsApp, phone and menu icons with no name, so the screen reader says only “button”.
- The page language in the code set to English while the content is Arabic.
- Product and service images with no alt text, which also hurts SEO.
- A ready-made accessibility widget on top of a site where nothing was fixed.
- Invisible focus when navigating by keyboard, so the user does not know where they are.
Where to start
Open your site in Chrome, run Lighthouse on mobile, and read the accessibility section. Then open it with the screen reader on your phone and try to make contact. What you find is usually fixed by whoever runs your site in a working day: colours, font, names and alt text. The deeper structure of the Arabic template is in the Arabic technical SEO article.
Where this sits in the audit
The audit runs automated accessibility checks on the crawled pages within the technical foundation: contrast, alt text, element naming, heading structure and page language, with every item classified by impact and by who executes it. It does not replace a full accessibility audit with real users where an authority requires one, but it exposes what is losing enquiries today.