Make your EAA accessible recruitmentsite with Serena

What is WCAG, and why does it matter so much right now?
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It's the international standard that defines what makes a website usable for people with disabilities — visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, you name it. As we covered in our EAA article, if you meet WCAG level AA, you're compliant with the EAA too. So WCAG isn't a "nice to have" anymore. It's the tool that gets you legally covered.
Here's the thing about WCAG-compliance: at Serena, we don't see digital accessibility as a separate feature you switch on. We see it as a fundamental part of the platform itself. Now, full WCAG compliance always depends on the content, design, and choices an organisation makes themselves — we can't write your job ads for you, and we can't pick your colour palette. But what we can do is make sure every technical precondition that has nothing to do with your house style or your content is built in by default.
That gives you a genuinely strong foundation to build an accessible careers site on. Let's walk through exactly what that means.

What does Serena take care of for you, by default?

Logical and consistent keyboard navigation (tab order)
Not everyone uses a mouse. People with motor impairments, people using screen readers, people who simply prefer it — they navigate using the Tab key, moving from link to link, field to field, button to button. If that tab order jumps around randomly, or skips elements entirely, a visitor can get completely lost on a page they can't even see properly. Serena makes sure the tab order follows the logical, visual flow of the page. If you build this yourself — or worse, inherit it from a platform that never thought about it — you risk a careers site where a keyboard user simply cannot reach your application button at all. That's not a minor inconvenience. That's a candidate gone, for good.

Correct use of semantic HTML elements
Headings, lists, forms, navigation areas — these aren't just visual styling choices, they're structural signals. A screen reader doesn't "see" a bold, large piece of text and think "ah, that's a heading." It needs the actual <h1>, <h2>, <nav>, <form> tags to know what it's looking at. Serena outputs this correctly, every time. Plenty of website builders let you create something that looks like a heading by just making text bigger — and visually, nobody would notice the difference. But to assistive technology, it's invisible. The visitor relying on that structure to understand your page simply never gets the information.

Centralised input of alternative texts (alt texts) for images
Alt text is the written description behind an image, read aloud by screen readers so visually impaired visitors know what they're looking at. Serena gives you one central place to add this, for every image on your site. It sounds small, but think about what's actually at stake: a candidate who can't see your "Meet the team" photo, your office snapshot, your "apply now" graphic — without alt text, that entire part of your story simply doesn't exist for them. On platforms without this built in, alt text becomes an afterthought that gets skipped under deadline pressure, and the accessibility gap quietly grows page by page.

Correct linking of labels and input fields within forms
Every form field needs to be properly linked to its label, so assistive technology can tell a visitor exactly what they're supposed to fill in. Without that link, a screen reader might announce a field with no context at all — just an empty box, no idea what's expected. Serena handles this connection correctly by default. And let's be honest: your application form is the single most important page on your entire careers site. It's the one moment that turns a visitor into a candidate. If someone can't understand what a field is asking for, they don't submit. You don't lose a click, you lose a hire.

Support for read-aloud solutions such as ReadSpeaker
Not everyone reads — some visitors listen. ReadSpeaker and similar tools convert your text into spoken audio, helping people with visual impairments, dyslexia, or anyone who simply processes information better by ear. Serena supports this technically out of the box. Bolting this onto a platform that wasn't built with it in mind is often a costly, fragile, custom integration — if it's possible at all. With Serena, it's already part of the foundation, meaning a meaningfully larger audience can actually engage with your vacancies instead of bouncing straight off the page.
Clear focus indicators for keyboard and assistive technology users
When you tab through a page, you need to see exactly where you are. That visible outline or highlight around a button or link — that's the focus indicator. Without it, keyboard users are navigating blind, genuinely unsure if they're about to click "Apply" or accidentally close the page. Serena makes sure this is clearly visible throughout. We've all seen modern, minimalist designs that strip this out for the sake of looks — and every time, it's the visitor who pays the price, not the designer.

Correct document structure with a logical heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
A clear heading hierarchy is like a table of contents built right into the page — H1 for the main title, H2 for sections, H3 for subsections, in proper order, with nothing skipped. Screen reader users frequently navigate by jumping from heading to heading to scan a page quickly, the same way a sighted visitor skims with their eyes. Serena keeps this hierarchy clean and logical. Get this wrong — skip straight from an H1 to an H4 because it "looked right" — and you've broken that entire navigation shortcut. The visitor isn't scanning your page anymore. They're lost in it.
 

The ability to add “skip links”
A skip link lets a keyboard or screen reader user jump straight to the main content, bypassing the header, the menu, the cookie banner, all of it. Without one, every single visitor using a keyboard has to tab through your entire navigation, every single time, on every single page, just to reach the job listing they actually came for. Serena gives you the option to add this. Imagine applying for ten jobs on a site without a skip link — that's potentially dozens of unnecessary tab presses before you even reach the content. That's not a small irritation. That's exhausting enough to make people give up.

Support for accessible error messages and validation within forms
When someone fills in a form incorrectly — a missing email, an invalid phone number — they need to be told clearly what went wrong and how to fix it, in a way assistive technology can pick up and announce. Serena supports this properly. On platforms that don't, an error might show up only as a red border with no explanatory text, or a message that a screen reader never even announces. The visitor knows something is wrong, but has absolutely no idea what or how to fix it. The result? A frustrated candidate who closes the tab instead of finishing their application.

Correct language settings within pages
Assistive technology needs to know what language it's dealing with, so it can pronounce words correctly and apply the right reading rules. Serena sets this correctly within the page. This matters enormously for a multilingual careers site — get the language tag wrong, and a screen reader might try to read perfectly normal Dutch text using English pronunciation rules. The result is a garbled, often nonsensical mess that makes your vacancy practically unintelligible to anyone listening rather than reading.

Responsive design that keeps content usable across devices and zoom levels
Responsive design means your site adapts properly to different screen sizes — and just as importantly, to different zoom levels. Plenty of visitors, especially those with visual impairments, zoom their browser to 200% or more. Serena's responsive build keeps content usable at every size and zoom level, not just on the devices you happened to test on. A site that wasn't built this way often breaks down under zoom: text overlapping, buttons disappearing off-screen, menus becoming unusable. For a visitor who needs that zoom level just to read your page at all, that's the difference between applying and giving up.

Technical support for accessibly published videos, documents, and downloads
Videos need the technical groundwork in place for captions; PDFs and downloads need to be structured so assistive technology can actually parse them, not just display them as a flat, meaningless image of text. Serena provides this technical support as standard. Skip this, and your beautifully produced company culture video or your downloadable benefits brochure becomes completely closed off to a hard-of-hearing visitor or someone using a screen reader — exactly the content meant to win candidates over, locked behind a barrier nobody intended to build.
 

Support for keyboard operation without dependency on mouse interactions
Every interactive element on your site — buttons, dropdowns, filters, the apply form — needs to be fully usable with a keyboard alone, no mouse required. Serena ensures this independence throughout. This is one of the most common accessibility failures out there: an interface that looks fully functional but secretly assumes a mouse at some critical step, like a hover-only dropdown menu. For someone who can't use a mouse, that's not a small bug. That's a wall, right in the middle of your candidate journey.

Consistent navigation structures throughout the entire website
Your menu, your footer, your navigation patterns — they need to behave the same way on every page. Serena keeps this consistent site-wide. When navigation changes unpredictably from page to page, every visitor has to relearn how to move around your site — but for someone with a cognitive impairment or someone relying on memorised patterns to navigate efficiently, that inconsistency isn't just annoying, it can be genuinely disorienting enough to make them leave.

Clean and valid HTML output that assistive technologies can process properly
This is the invisible foundation underneath everything else: well-structured, standards-compliant HTML that screen readers and other assistive tools can actually parse correctly. Serena generates this by default. Messy, invalid HTML — full of unclosed tags, incorrect nesting, or non-standard markup — might render perfectly fine to the eye in a regular browser, while assistive technology trips over it constantly, misreading or simply skipping content entirely. It's the kind of problem you'll never spot by looking at your own site, and the kind of problem that quietly excludes people every single day.

So what's still up to you?
Here's the honest part: the final WCAG level your website actually reaches still depends on choices made in design, content creation, and editing. Think about colour contrast, writing in plain and understandable language, video transcripts, subtitles, document accessibility, and using headings and links correctly and meaningfully.
Serena can't decide your brand colours for you, and we can't rewrite your vacancy texts. What we can do — and already do, by default — is make sure none of the technical groundwork stands in your way. By building the technical accessibility foundation into the platform itself, we let you focus entirely on the content side of the equation, and that makes the road to WCAG compliance significantly shorter and significantly less painful.

Why does this actually matter?
Go back to our EAA article for a second: this isn't red tape for the sake of red tape. It's about reaching the millions of people who might be perfectly qualified for your open role, but who simply can't get past your website to prove it. Every item on the list above is a door. Serena makes sure that door is already built and already open. What you put behind it — your story, your tone, your vacancies — that part is up to you.
And if you're currently running on a platform that hasn't thought about any of this? It's worth asking yourself honestly: how many candidates have already turned away without you ever knowing it happened.

Want to know more about how Serena handles accessibility, or need help getting the content side sorted too? Feel free to get in touch — we're happy to help you build a careers site that genuinely works for everyone.