Website accessibility, without the compliance theatre

What does accessibility actually mean for a small business site?

It means that the person who cannot use a mouse can still complete your contact form, the person using a screen reader can still find your phone number, and the person with low vision can still read your prices at 200% zoom. It is not a badge or a plugin. It is whether the site works.

The legal framing varies by country — the Equality Act in the UK, the European Accessibility Act across the EU, the AODA in Ontario, the ADA as interpreted by US courts — but every one of them points at broadly the same technical standard, and that standard is WCAG.

What does WCAG 2.2 AA require?

WCAG organises requirements under four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Level AA is the conformance level regulations reference. Below is the subset that accounts for most real-world failures on small business sites.

• Text contrast of at least 4.5:1, and 3:1 for large text and interface components
• Every function reachable and operable by keyboard alone, with no traps
• A visible focus indicator on every interactive element
• Form fields with real label elements, and errors identified in text
• Images with alt text that conveys what the image conveys
• Headings that describe the sections beneath them, in order, without skipping levels
• Content that reflows at 200% zoom without horizontal scrolling
• Touch targets of at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, with adequate spacing

Why do automated scanners miss most problems?

Because most accessibility failures are semantic rather than syntactic. A scanner can tell you an image has no alt attribute. It cannot tell you the alt text says "IMG_4471.jpg" is a photograph of a kitchen when the page is about bathrooms.

Industry testing consistently puts automated detection at around 30 to 40 per cent of WCAG failures. That is not a reason to skip the scan — the third it finds are unambiguous and cheap to fix. It is a reason not to treat a clean Lighthouse score as a result.

Scanners catch

Missing alt attributes, insufficient contrast, missing form labels, invalid ARIA, missing lang.

Scanners cannot catch

Whether alt text is accurate, whether headings describe their sections, whether focus order is logical, whether an error message is useful, whether a modal can be escaped.

How do I test a site properly in an afternoon?

1. Run axe DevTools or Lighthouse on each distinct template and fix every reported failure — these are unambiguous.
2. Unplug the mouse. Tab through every page. You must reach everything, operate everything, and always see where focus is.
3. Complete the contact form and the checkout by keyboard alone, including recovering from a deliberate error.
4. Turn on NVDA or VoiceOver. Navigate by headings, then by links. Both lists must make sense read aloud out of context.
5. Zoom to 200%. Nothing should overlap, be cut off, or require horizontal scrolling.
6. Enable Windows High Contrast or forced-colors and confirm the page remains usable when your palette is discarded.

That sequence finds more than any tool will, and it takes an afternoon rather than a project. The screen reader step is the one people skip and the one that changes how they write markup permanently.

What is the overlap with SEO?

Substantial, and not a coincidence. A screen reader and a crawler consume the same document through the same structural signals: heading hierarchy, link text, alt attributes, semantic elements, and whether content exists in the HTML at all.

A page where every link says "read more" is unusable by heading-and-link navigation and simultaneously tells a search engine nothing about what it links to. Fixing one fixes the other. This is the rare case where doing the right thing and doing the profitable thing are the same edit.

Do accessibility overlays work?

No, and the evidence against them is now substantial. Overlay widgets — the ones promising one line of JavaScript makes a site compliant — have been the subject of hundreds of US lawsuits against sites that had installed them, and are opposed in an open letter signed by hundreds of accessibility practitioners, including many disabled users.

They cannot fix semantic problems because they cannot know what your images depict or whether your headings are meaningful. Several actively interfere with the assistive technology a user already has configured, which makes the experience worse rather than better.

What does this site do about it?

Contrast ratios are recorded as comments beside the colour values, with the measured number. That is there because I once wrote in a comment that a WhatsApp-green button passed, and Lighthouse measured it at 4.13:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement. The colour is now #0F7A6B at 5.23:1.

The lesson generalised: measure, do not assert, and write the measurement down where the next person will see it. Accessibility regressions are almost always someone confidently changing a value they did not test.

Questions people ask about this

Is my small business website legally required to be accessible?

In the UK, the Equality Act requires reasonable adjustments for disabled people, which reaches commercial websites. The European Accessibility Act extends obligations to many private-sector services from 2025. In practice the honest answer is that the legal exposure is real but the commercial argument arrives first — an inaccessible form loses you the specific enquiry from the person who could not complete it.

How much does it cost to make an existing site accessible?

It depends entirely on how it was built. A site with semantic HTML and a sensible design usually needs contrast adjustments, form labels and focus styles — a day or two. A site built with div-based components, custom dropdowns and no keyboard handling can need a rebuild of the interactive parts, which is a different order of cost. An audit tells you which situation you are in before you commit.

Does accessibility slow a site down?

The opposite, usually. Semantic HTML is less markup than the div-and-JavaScript equivalent, real labels weigh nothing, and removing an overlay widget removes a render-blocking script. Accessible sites tend to be lighter because the accessible way of building a component is generally the simpler one.

What is an accessibility statement and do I need one?

A page stating which standard you target, how far you currently conform, what is known not to conform, and how to report a barrier. It is mandatory for UK and EU public sector bodies and good practice everywhere else. Claiming partial conformance with named gaps is more credible than claiming full conformance and being disproved by the first counter-example.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.