Website Accessibility Help: Where to Start

Web accessibility means people with disabilities — visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive — can perceive, navigate, and use your website. The reference standard most organizations use is WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), most commonly at Level AA.

Two forces have made this urgent for ordinary businesses. First, accessibility-related legal demand letters have become common, and small businesses are frequent targets. Second, an inaccessible site simply turns away customers — including the fast-growing population of older users.

The issues we find most often

After years of accessibility assessments, the same problems appear again and again:

• Images without meaningful alternative text
• Text with insufficient color contrast
• Forms whose fields have no programmatic labels
• Interfaces that cannot be operated with a keyboard alone
• Missing heading structure, so screen readers can't navigate
• PDF documents that are effectively unreadable to assistive technology

A sensible order of operations

Start with an assessment to know where you stand — automated scanning catches perhaps a third of issues, so a human review matters. Then fix the highest-impact problems first: forms, navigation, and the pages customers actually use to do business with you. Finally, adopt patterns so new content doesn't reintroduce old problems.

Accessibility is maintenance, not a certificate. Sites change; the discipline is keeping them accessible as they do.