Website accessibility for small businesses: the checks you can do yourself

A customer can’t read your opening hours because the grey text disappears on their phone in the sun. Another can’t send your contact form because the submit button doesn’t work without a mouse. Neither of them tells you. They leave, and you never find out why the enquiry didn’t come.

That’s what an inaccessible website costs a small business. Most of the fixes are cheap, and you can find the worst problems yourself in under an hour, without any technical knowledge.

Who it helps

Accessibility is often treated as a niche concern. The list of people it affects says otherwise:

• people who use a screen reader, which reads the page aloud;
• people who can’t use a mouse and move through a page with the keyboard;
• people with low vision who zoom in or enlarge text;
• older customers on phones, where small text and fiddly buttons are hardest;
• anyone reading a screen in bright sunlight, or with one hand while holding a child or a bag.

Several of those aren’t disabilities at all. A site built for the first group tends to work better for everyone, and it often loads faster too, which matters for the reasons in what a slow site costs you.

What the law expects

The Equality Act 2010 gives businesses that provide services to the public a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. The explanatory notes describe the duty as anticipatory: you think ahead about what disabled customers will need, rather than waiting for someone to ask. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance for service providers says this covers websites, and names people who use text-to-speech software and people who can’t use a mouse as examples.

What’s “reasonable” depends on the circumstances, including cost and the resources of the business, and the duty doesn’t require changes that would alter the basic nature of your service. There’s no fixed checklist in the Act itself. This is general information, not legal advice. If you’re worried about a specific complaint, speak to a solicitor.

The yardstick: WCAG 2.2

When people talk about an accessible website, they usually mean one that meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C. The current version is WCAG 2.2, first published in October 2023. Each guideline is graded A, AA or AAA, and Level AA is the target most organisations work towards. WCAG 3 exists only as an early draft.

You don’t need to read the standard to make progress. The checks below line up with some of its most common failures.

Seven checks you can do yourself

Tab through the page. Click in the address bar, then press Tab repeatedly. You should be able to reach every link, button and form field, in a sensible order, and see clearly where you are at each step. If the highlight vanishes, or you get stuck in a menu, keyboard users are stuck too.

Zoom to 200%. Press Ctrl and + (Cmd and + on a Mac) until the browser shows 200%. Text should get bigger and the layout should rearrange, with nothing cut off or overlapping. WCAG asks for text to resize to 200% without losing content.

Check text contrast. Light grey text on white is a common failure. WCAG AA asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text. Free tools such as WebAIM’s contrast checker will tell you the ratio if you give them the two colours.

Check images have alt text. Alt text is the description a screen reader reads out instead of the image. In most website editors it’s a field next to each image. A photo of your team at work needs a short description. A decorative swirl should have empty alt text, so it’s skipped.

Check forms have labels. Each field needs a visible label that stays put, such as “Email address” above the box. Placeholder text that disappears when you start typing isn’t enough, because a screen reader may not announce it and people forget what the field was for.

Read your link text on its own. Screen reader users often pull up a list of every link on a page. A list of “Click here”, “Read more” and “Click here” tells them nothing. “See our prices” or “Read the redesign checklist” does.

Caption your videos. Any video with speech needs captions. Auto-generated captions on YouTube or social platforms are a starting point, but correct the mistakes before you publish.

If you’re planning a rebuild, put these on the list from the start. Our website redesign checklist covers the rest of what to plan for.

Say what you’ve done

An accessibility statement tells visitors what you’ve done, what still has gaps and how to contact you if something doesn’t work for them. It isn’t a legal requirement for most private businesses, but it’s a simple way to show you’ve thought about it and to give people a route other than leaving.

Our own accessibility statement names the standard we aim for (WCAG 2.2 at Level AA), lists what’s built into the site, such as keyboard navigation with visible focus, labelled form fields and respect for reduced motion settings, and has a section for known limitations. Keep that section up to date as you find things.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your site’s accessibility, get in touch.