Most articles on this subject open with a lawsuit. We're going to start somewhere less exciting and more useful: accessibility is one of the few things about a website that can be measured rather than argued about. Colour contrast is a ratio. Keyboard access is a yes or a no. Either the form field has a label or it doesn't.
That matters because almost everything else you're sold about a website is unfalsifiable. "Modern design," "conversion-optimised," "built for growth" — nobody can check any of it. This you can check, on your own site, this afternoon, without hiring anyone. Here's what to check and what the answers mean.
What the standard actually is#
There is one, and it's public. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — WCAG — are a numbered list of testable conditions, and the level nearly everyone means when they say "accessible" is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. It isn't a philosophy. It's about fifty specific rules, each with a number, most of which a small business site either passes or fails outright.
- Contrast the standard asks for on body text (1.4.3)
- 4.5:1
- …and on buttons, icons and input borders (1.4.11)
- 3:1
- Zoom a page must survive without losing content (1.4.4)
- 200%
Those three are worth internalising because they're where the disagreements happen. A designer's light grey caption on a white background is usually somewhere around 3:1 — it looks refined on a good monitor in a dim room, and it is genuinely unreadable outdoors on a phone at arm's length. The standard doesn't care which of you has better taste. It's 4.5, or it isn't.
Accessibility is one of the few things about a website you can check rather than argue about.
The four failures that account for most of it#
You could work through all fifty criteria. You don't need to — on small-business sites, the same four turn up again and again, and they're the four that lock people out rather than merely inconvenience them.
Text nobody can read against its background
Pale grey body copy, white text over a photograph, a brand colour used for links that was chosen on a screen brighter than most. This is the most common failure and the cheapest to fix, because fixing it is changing a colour value.
Things you can only reach with a mouse
Menus that open on hover, sliders you have to drag, a booking widget that swallows the Tab key and never gives it back. Anyone who navigates by keyboard — through injury, tremor, low vision, or just preference — hits a wall there. So does anyone using voice control.
Form fields with no real label
Placeholder text is not a label. It disappears the moment someone types, it usually fails contrast, and a screen reader may not announce it at all. On a contact form, that's the difference between an inquiry and an abandoned page.
Images that say nothing
Every image needs either a description or an explicit mark saying it's decorative. Sites usually get this wrong in one of two directions: no descriptions at all, or a description on every last divider and swirl, which is its own kind of noise.
| The failure | Who it stops | What they do next |
|---|---|---|
| Low-contrast text | Anyone over about 40, and anyone outdoors | Squints, gives up, calls someone else |
| Mouse-only navigation | Keyboard and voice-control users | Can't reach the menu at all |
| Unlabelled form fields | Screen reader users, and every autofill | Abandons the form halfway |
| Undescribed images | Screen reader users; also every search engine | Hears "image, image, image" and leaves |
Read that middle column again. It is not a small or unusual group of people, and the biggest cohort in it — people whose eyes have simply got older — would never describe themselves as having a disability. They'd just say your website was hard to read, if they told you at all, which they won't.
How to check your own site in twenty minutes#
None of this needs a specialist. Do these four in order, on the pages that actually matter — your home page, your main service page, and your contact page.
The twenty-minute audit
- Put the mouse away. Load your home page and press Tab, repeatedly. You should always be able to see where you are, and you should be able to reach the menu, every link, and the contact form. If you lose track of the highlight, that's a fail (2.4.7). If you get stuck inside a widget, that's a worse one.
- Check your greys. Take the colour of your body text and the colour behind it into any free contrast checker. Under 4.5:1 on normal text is a fail. Do the same for the text on your main button.
- Zoom to 200%. Ctrl or Cmd and the plus key, ten times. Text should reflow and stay readable. If columns start overlapping or the menu vanishes, that's a fail (1.4.4).
- Turn the sound on. Every phone has a screen reader built in — VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android. Switch it on for ninety seconds on your own contact page. It is an uncomfortable experience the first time, and it will tell you more than any report.
- Then run a scanner — the free ones built into browsers are fine. Do it last, and treat a clean result as a starting point rather than a verdict, for the reason immediately below.
The legal part, honestly#
Here's where most articles get shrill, so let's be careful. We're a web studio, not lawyers, and none of this is legal advice. What we can tell you is the shape of the thing, because it comes up on nearly every call.
The Americans with Disabilities Act predates the web and doesn't name a technical standard for private businesses. Courts have spent years disagreeing about how it applies to websites, and there is still no single federal rule that says "a small business site must meet X." What there is: a steady flow of demand letters and settlements against businesses whose sites fail the basics, and a strong tendency for everyone involved — plaintiffs, defendants and regulators — to reach for WCAG as the yardstick.
The clearest signal came in 2024, when the Department of Justice set a technical standard for state and local government websites and named WCAG 2.1 Level AA specifically. That rule does not cover private businesses and nobody should tell you it does. It tells you something more useful: when the federal government had to pick a number, that's the number it picked.
Why this is the same work as making the site good#
The pitch you usually hear for accessibility is moral, and it's a real argument — but it isn't the one that changes minds on a sales call, so here's the practical one. Almost every accessibility fix is also a conversion fix.
Text that passes contrast is text your customers can read on a phone in a car park. A form with real labels is a form autofill can complete, so it gets abandoned less. Descriptive links — "see our emergency call-out rates" instead of "click here" — are what a screen reader user needs and also what a search engine reads. Proper heading structure is how assistive technology navigates a page and how Google works out what the page is about. A page that survives 200% zoom is a page that survives a phone held at arm's length.
The overlap isn't total — describing your images helps nobody's conversion rate directly — but it's most of the list. Which is why we don't sell accessibility as an add-on. It isn't a service; it's what checking your work looks like.
Nobody issues certificates. What can honestly be sold is testing, findings, and fixes.
What to ask whoever builds your next site#
One question does most of the work, and it's the same shape as the questions worth asking about hosting or maintenance: ask for the standard by name and ask when it gets measured.
“Which standard, at which level?”
You want to hear a version and a level — WCAG 2.1 AA, or 2.2 AA. "Fully accessible" and "ADA compliant" are not answers; they're adjectives. A studio that works to a standard will name it without hesitating.
“Is it checked before launch, or after I ask?”
This is the real question. Accessibility retrofitted onto a finished design is expensive, because the failures are usually in the colour palette and the navigation — the two things everything else was built on top of.
“What happens when I add a page later?”
Most sites pass at launch and drift. A photo added without a description, a promo banner in a brand colour that doesn't contrast. Ask who checks, and when.
If you're weighing this against everything else a site has to get right, two companions: why your website isn't getting you leads, which shares three of the four failures above, and what actually happens when you hire a studio, which is where the checking should sit in the process.