Accessibility on a website tends to be imagined as a specialist discipline with its own budget line. On a small business website it is mostly a handful of ordinary build decisions made properly, and nearly all of them make the website better for everybody else at the same time.
I run an accessibility check on every build before it goes to a client. Not as an add-on — it is part of the work, in the same way that checking the website loads on a phone is part of the work.
Who this is actually for
The group is larger than most people picture. Government survey figures have put the proportion of UK adults reporting a disability at around a quarter in recent years. The permanent cases are only part of it, though, because the same design decisions matter for:
- Anyone reading a phone screen in bright sunlight, which is most people outdoors.
- Anyone holding a child, a toolbox or a steering wheel and operating a phone one-handed.
- Anyone whose arms are a little longer than they used to be, which is most of us eventually.
- Anyone on a cracked screen, an old device or a poor connection.
That is a large share of your visitors having a slightly harder time, for reasons that have nothing to do with how the website looks on the machine it was designed on.
Where the law sits, stated carefully
I am not a solicitor and this is not legal advice, but the shape is worth knowing because it is routinely overstated in sales pitches.
The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. It does not name websites specifically, and it predates most of the modern web, but the general understanding is that a website offering a service to the public falls within it.
Separately there are the 2018 accessibility regulations, which do set a hard standard — and they apply to public sector bodies. If you are a private business, those regulations are not binding on you. The standard they point at, WCAG, is nonetheless the sensible thing to work to, because it is the only widely agreed definition of what "accessible" means in practice.
Anyone telling a small business it is legally required to be WCAG compliant or face a fine is overselling. The honest version is that there is a duty to make reasonable adjustments, that WCAG is the best available guide to what reasonable looks like, and that most of it is cheap to do.
Do this because it widens who can buy from you and because it is inexpensive, not because someone has frightened you about a fine. The commercial case stands up on its own.
The things that matter most
Colour contrast. Light grey text on a white background is a common design choice and one of the most common accessibility failures. The working standard is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for ordinary text and 3:1 for large text. There are free contrast checkers online where you paste in two colours and get a yes or no.
Text that survives being enlarged. Zoom your website to 200% in a browser and look at what happens. Text should reflow and stay readable. If it disappears behind something, gets cut off, or forces sideways scrolling, that is worth fixing.
Alt text on images. A short description, read aloud by a screen reader in place of the image. Describe what it shows and why it is there — "engineer servicing a commercial boiler" rather than "IMG_4021". Decorative images that add nothing should carry an empty alt attribute rather than a description, so they are skipped instead of narrated.
Keyboard operation. Some people cannot use a mouse. Press Tab repeatedly on your homepage and watch. You should be able to reach every link and button, in a sensible order, and always see which one you are on. A missing focus outline is usually the result of it being removed for looking untidy, and it is worth putting back in a form you are happy with.
Labels on form fields. Every field needs a label properly attached to it in the code, not just placeholder text inside the box. Placeholder text vanishes the moment somebody starts typing, which is exactly when they may want to check what the field was.
Link text that means something. "Read our terms and conditions" rather than "click here". People using screen readers often pull up a list of every link on a page, and a list of nine identical entries is no use to anybody.
Headings in order. A screen reader user commonly navigates by jumping between headings, so a broken outline takes that shortcut away. It was the most common fault in the survey I ran of 88 local websites, and the detail is in the piece on heading structure.
Not relying on colour alone. If an error is shown only by turning a field red, it is invisible to a colour-blind visitor. Add a word.
Three of these — contrast, alt text and link wording — are content changes you or your team can make without a developer. They cover a meaningful share of the common failures.
Checking it yourself, cheaply
- Tab through your homepage and your contact page. Can you reach everything? Can you always see where you are?
- Zoom to 200% and read it.
- Run a free automated checker. Browser extensions such as axe DevTools or WAVE will flag contrast problems, missing alt text and unlabelled fields in seconds.
- Turn on the screen reader already on your computer — VoiceOver on a Mac, Narrator on Windows — and try to reach your phone number using only the keyboard. This is uncomfortable the first time and more informative than any report.
Automated tools find perhaps a third of the issues that exist. They are still worth running, because that third includes most of the cheap ones.
One thing to be sceptical about
There is a category of product, usually sold as an accessibility overlay or widget, that promises to make a website compliant by adding one line of code. They generally provide a floating toolbar offering larger text and different colours.
They do not fix the underlying markup, which is where most real problems live, and among people who actually use assistive technology they are not well regarded. If your website has unlabelled form fields and a broken heading outline, an overlay leaves both exactly as they were. The money is better spent on the list above.
Where to start
Pick the three pages that matter — usually the homepage, your main service page and the contact page — and work through the checks on those. That covers the majority of your traffic and surfaces whatever pattern is repeated across the rest of the website.
The wider list of what a website has to get right is in what a small business website actually needs. Accessibility sits inside that rather than beside it, which is roughly the point.