Is Your Website Accessible? A First Check for Small Businesses

An accessible website is one that people with disabilities can use: someone who is blind and uses a screen reader, someone who cannot use a mouse, someone with low vision who zooms in, someone who is deaf and needs captions. For a small business, it is also simply a website that more customers can use. This article covers what U.S. guidance says, what automated tools can and cannot tell you, and a first check you can do yourself.

This is practical guidance from a web designer, not legal advice.

What the guidance says

The U.S. Department of Justice published guidance in 2022 on web accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It says that businesses open to the public must make sure their online goods and services are accessible to people with disabilities, and that businesses have flexibility in how they do that.¹ It points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the federal Section 508 standards as helpful technical guidance.¹

WCAG is the international standard published by the W3C. It is organized around four ideas: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.² The DOJ guidance also lists practical examples, including enough color contrast, text alternatives for images, captions on videos, labeled form fields, text that can be resized, and pages that work with a keyboard.¹

What an automated score tells you

Tools like Lighthouse, which runs inside Google’s PageSpeed Insights, give an Accessibility score out of 100. It is useful: it catches missing image descriptions, low-contrast text, unlabeled buttons, and similar problems in seconds. My Performance Lab records that score for every site I have built.

But Lighthouse’s own documentation says only a subset of accessibility issues can be detected automatically, and encourages manual testing too.⁴ A tool can tell whether an image has a description, not whether the description makes sense. It cannot tell whether a menu is usable with a keyboard from start to finish. A 100 means no automated check failed. It does not mean every visitor can use the site.

Seven checks you can run yourself

The W3C publishes “Easy Checks”, a first review anyone can do without special knowledge.³ It is meant as a quick look, not a full audit; a page can pass these checks and still have barriers.³ Here is a version adapted for a typical small business site:

1. Page titles. Look at the browser tab. Does each page have a title that says what it is, like “Pricing | Your Business”, rather than “Home” on every page?
2. Image descriptions. For important images, such as photos of your work or a logo that is a link, is there a text description (alt text)? Decorative images do not need one.
3. Headings. Does the page have one main heading and clear section headings? Screen reader users jump between headings the way sighted users skim.
4. Contrast. Is all text easy to read? Light grey on white and thin text over photos are common problems.
5. Zoom. Zoom the browser to 200%. Can you still read everything without text overlapping or disappearing?
6. Keyboard only. Put the mouse aside and press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you always see where you are?
7. Forms. On your contact or quote form, does each field have a visible label, and do error messages say what to fix?

The most common fixes are small

• Write real alt text for the photos that matter: “Flagstone patio with fire pit, installed in Graysville” beats “IMG_2041”.
• Raise contrast on light grey text and on text placed over photos.
• Use real buttons and links, not clickable images or text with no focus outline.
• Label every form field, rather than relying on placeholder text that disappears when you type.
• Caption your videos, especially if a video explains your service or pricing.

My take: accessibility is easiest and cheapest when it is part of the build, not a patch added later. Most of the fixes above also make a site clearer for everyone: better contrast helps people outdoors on a phone, and labeled forms get fewer abandoned quotes.

Where to go next

Run the seven checks on your homepage and your contact page. If several fail, start with contrast, alt text, and form labels; they are the quickest to fix. For a business that relies heavily on its site, such as one that takes bookings or payments online, it is worth having a specialist test it with real assistive technology. And if you would like to see how your site does on the automated checks first, the free website review is a good place to start.

Sources

Numbers in the text refer to these sources. Statements marked “My take” are my own interpretation.

1. Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA (opens in new tab) U.S. Department of Justice (ADA.gov)
2. WCAG 2 Overview (opens in new tab) W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
3. Easy Checks: A First Review of Web Accessibility (opens in new tab) W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
4. Lighthouse accessibility scoring (opens in new tab) Chrome for Developers