Who your website is unusable for

Your website works perfectly when you test it, because you know what everything is called, where it lives and what happens when you click it. That is not a test. It is a memory exercise.

Website accessibility gets filed under compliance, or under charity, and both framings lose the point. A meaningful share of the people who cannot use a website are not registered as anything. They are middle-aged and their close vision has gone, or they are outdoors in bright sun, or they are holding a child and using one thumb, or they have a trackpad that has stopped registering short clicks.

The fixes are the same either way, and most of them are small. What follows is what actually breaks, roughly in order of how often we find it.

Why this is not the niche it sounds like

The mental image is a blind person with a screen reader, and that person matters, but they are not the majority of the problem. Three groups are much larger and much less visible.

People whose eyesight has simply aged, who will not describe themselves as having a disability and will not tell you your site is hard to read. They will just use a competitor whose text is bigger. People using a phone in circumstances the designer never pictured — outside, on a cracked screen, one-handed, on a train. And people whose hands are unsteady for any of a hundred reasons, for whom a small close button placed near another button is a coin toss.

None of those people file a complaint. They leave, and they register in your analytics as a bounce, which is why this problem is invisible from the inside of a business. It is also why it hides in the same place as everything else that costs you inquiries — the page where sessions quietly end is worth looking at before the page you assume is at fault.

The things that break it, in order

Text that is too pale

Light gray text on white is the single most common failure, and it is nearly always a deliberate design decision made on a good monitor in a dim office by someone in their thirties.

There is a defined standard for this — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C, set a minimum contrast ratio between text and its background, and free checkers will tell you whether any pair of colors passes. Small pale gray captions, placeholder text inside form fields, and pale text over photographs are where sites usually fail.

Anything that only works with a mouse

Try this now: open your own site and press the Tab key repeatedly. You should see a visible outline moving through every link, button and form field in a sensible order, and you should be able to reach everything and operate it with Enter or Space.

Common failures are a menu that only opens on hover, a slider you can only drag, a cookie banner you cannot dismiss, and, the most frequent of all, a visible focus outline that a designer removed because it looked untidy. Removing it does not remove the focus; it removes your ability to see where it is.

Images with no description

Every meaningful image needs a short written description, so that people using a screen reader know what it shows. Decorative images should be marked as decorative so they are skipped rather than announced.

The useful test is to imagine reading the page aloud down the phone to someone. Where you would say “there’s a photo of the workshop with the two vans outside”, that is the description. Where you would say nothing, mark it decorative.

Forms whose labels are only placeholders

Gray hint text inside a box disappears the moment someone starts typing, taking with it any reminder of what the field was for. It also usually fails the contrast standard, and screen readers treat it inconsistently.

Every field wants a real label above it that stays put. While you are in there, count the fields — every additional question is another chance for someone to reconsider, and that is true for everybody, not only for people with a disability.

Error messages that only exist in color

A field that turns red and says nothing is invisible to people who cannot distinguish it, and unhelpful to everyone else. Errors need words, next to the field, saying what is wrong and what to do about it.

The legal position, briefly and honestly

This is genuinely worth knowing about, and it is also the part where you should take advice rather than take our word for it.

In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act does not mention websites anywhere in its text, which is why the position is less settled than people assume. Courts have applied Title III to the websites of businesses open to the public for years now, and the appeals circuits disagree about whether a site has to be tied to a physical location for that to hold. Suits over inaccessible sites are filed constantly, and small businesses are not exempt from them.

Two things are firmer. The Department of Justice published a rule in April 2024 requiring state and local government websites to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, on compliance dates that depend on the size of the entity. And Section 508 has long applied to federal agencies, which in practice means anybody selling to them. If you sell to consumers in the European Union or the United Kingdom, their rules are separate again and stricter in places.

Whether any of it reaches you depends on what you sell, to whom, and how large you are, and that is the question to put to a lawyer rather than to a web designer. What we can say is that the technical standard everyone points at is the same one in almost every case, so work done to meet it is not wasted whichever way the legal question lands.

The version of this that is oversold

To be fair to the skeptics, there is a real industry selling accessibility badly.

The overlay widgets, meaning the little accessibility icon that opens a panel of toggles, are widely criticized by the people they claim to serve — organizations of blind and partially sighted users have been notably unenthusiastic about them. They sit on top of the problem rather than fixing it, and in some cases they interfere with the assistive software someone is already using and prefers.

There is also no such thing as a site that is finished being accessible, and anyone selling a one-off certificate is selling a photograph of a moving object. Treat it the way you treat the rest of the site: something that is mostly right and gets corrected when it drifts.

What to do first

All of this is free and none of it needs a developer until step four.

1. Press Tab through your own site. Start with the homepage and the contact form. Note anything you cannot reach or cannot see the focus on.
2. Check your color contrast. Run your text and background colors through a free checker, starting with the smallest and palest text.
3. Read the homepage aloud. Describe the images as you go, to somebody who has not seen it. Where you struggle is where there is no description.
4. Hand the list over. Give it to whoever maintains the site. Most of it is CSS and markup, and most of it is an afternoon.
5. Re-check after any redesign. This is exactly the sort of thing a visual refresh quietly undoes.

Two of those steps will find something. They almost always do, including on sites built by people who care — which is the honest reason to check rather than assume. If you would rather have someone else go through it, send us the address and we will tell you what we find, in plain language and without a price tag attached to it.

Start with the Tab key. It takes two minutes, it needs nothing installed, and it will tell you more about your site than an afternoon of looking at it will.