What accessibility actually means
Accessibility is about making sure your website works for everyone, including people who experience it differently to how you do. That covers a wide range of needs. Someone with low vision might zoom to 200% or use a screen reader that reads the page aloud. Someone with a motor condition might browse with a keyboard instead of a mouse. Someone who is colour blind might not be able to tell your red error message from the black body text.
It is easy to picture a small group of users here, but the numbers are bigger than most business owners expect. Around one in five people in the UK has a disability, and many more have temporary or situational limitations. A broken wrist, bright sunlight on a phone screen, a noisy train where you cannot play audio. Good accessibility helps all of them, not just a niche.
The reassuring part is that most of the work overlaps with things you should be doing anyway. Clear structure, readable text, sensible labels, and pages that load and behave predictably. A lot of it sits right alongside the fundamentals we cover in our simple guide to effective web design.
The legal and ethical case
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. Websites count. A private company is not held to the strict public sector standard, but reasonable adjustments still applies, and an obviously unusable site is hard to defend if a complaint lands on your desk.
Most small businesses will never face a legal claim. That is not really the point. The stronger argument is commercial. If a wheelchair user could not get through your front door, you would fix the step. An inaccessible website is the same barrier, just less visible. Every person who cannot read your prices, fill in your form, or reach your checkout is a customer you have quietly turned away.
Accessibility is not a favour you do for a minority. It is the difference between a website that works for everyone and one that only works for people who happen to browse the way you do.
There is a search angle too. Search engines read your site in a way that is not far off how a screen reader does, through structured markup rather than visual layout. Descriptive links, proper headings, and text alternatives all help both audiences at once. Accessibility and SEO tend to pull in the same direction.
Where to start: four quick wins
You do not need to memorise the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to make real progress. Start with the four areas that cause the most problems and are the easiest to check yourself.
1. Colour contrast
Low contrast text is the single most common issue we find on small business sites. Pale grey text on a white background might look elegant in a design mockup, but it becomes unreadable for anyone with reduced vision, and hard work for everyone else. The guideline is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text.
You can check any colour pairing in a couple of seconds with a free online contrast checker. Paste in your text colour and background colour, and it tells you whether you pass. A few things to watch for:
- Light grey body text and placeholder text in forms
- White text sitting over a photo or gradient, where the background varies
- Coloured buttons where the label does not stand out clearly
- Links that rely on colour alone to show they are clickable
That last point matters. If your only signal that something is a link is that it is blue, a colour blind visitor may miss it entirely. Underlines or another visual cue solve it.
2. Image alt text
Alt text is a short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load. Without it, a screen reader either says nothing useful or reads out the file name, which is not much help to anyone.
Good alt text describes the content and purpose of the image in plain language. A photo on your team page might be “Two members of the Notus Digital team reviewing a website on a laptop.” A decorative flourish that adds no information can have empty alt text so screen readers skip it. Product photos, charts, and anything carrying meaning should always be described. This overlaps neatly with search visibility, which we go into in our guide to image SEO for non-developers.
3. Keyboard navigation
Plenty of people cannot use a mouse and rely entirely on the keyboard, usually the Tab key to move between links and buttons, and Enter to activate them. Here is a test you can run right now. Click into your homepage, then press Tab repeatedly and watch what happens.
- Can you reach every link, button, and form field in a logical order?
- Can you see which element is currently selected, or does the highlight disappear?
- Can you open and close your menu without touching the mouse?
- Can you complete your contact form using the keyboard alone?
The visible highlight, called the focus indicator, gets removed on a surprising number of sites because a designer thought it looked untidy. Removing it leaves keyboard users lost. Keep it. If you cannot Tab your way through your own site, neither can your visitors, and forms are where this bites hardest. It is worth pairing this check with the ideas in our post on small form changes that lift submissions.
4. Heading structure
Headings are not just big bold text. They form the outline of your page, and screen reader users often jump between them to find what they need, the same way a sighted reader skims. That only works if the headings follow a logical order.
Each page should have one main H1, then H2s for the main sections, then H3s nested beneath them where needed. Do not skip levels for visual effect, and do not use a heading tag just to make something look bigger. If the structure reads as a sensible outline when you strip the styling away, you are in good shape. Clear headings help every reader, sighted or not, which is why they are worth getting right on every page.
A few things people get wrong
Accessibility overlays are the big one. These are third-party widgets that promise instant compliance with a line of code. In practice they often make things worse, clashing with the assistive tools people already use, and they have prompted a wave of complaints from disabled users. Real accessibility comes from the underlying build, not a bolt-on.
Another trap is treating accessibility as a one-off box to tick. Every new blog post, product, or landing page can reintroduce problems, so it is worth building the habits into how content gets added rather than auditing once a year and forgetting about it.
Finally, do not forget mobile. Touch targets that are too small or too close together are an accessibility problem in their own right, and a growing share of your visitors are on a phone. We make the case for that in why your phone visitors matter most.
Start small, keep going
You will not fix everything in an afternoon, and you do not need to. Pick one area from the four above, run the check, and put right what you find. Contrast and alt text are the fastest wins for most sites. Keyboard and heading fixes tend to need a bit more care but pay off across every page.
If you would rather have someone go through your site properly and hand you a prioritised list, that is the kind of thing we do as part of our web design work here in Bognor Regis. Either way, the important thing is to start. A site that works for more people is a better site, and usually a better performing one too.
Frequently asked questions
The Equality Act 2010 requires businesses to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage, and websites are covered. Private companies are not held to the strict public sector standard, but an obviously unusable site is hard to defend. In practice, most small businesses should treat accessibility as good commercial sense rather than waiting for a legal reason.
Colour contrast is usually the fastest win. Pale grey text on a white background is the most common issue we see, and you can test any colour pairing in seconds with a free online contrast checker. Aim for a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal body text.
Generally no. Overlay widgets that promise instant compliance often clash with the assistive tools people already use and can make the experience worse, which is why they have drawn complaints from disabled users. Real accessibility comes from how the site is built, not a bolt-on script. It is better to fix the underlying issues.
Click into your homepage, then press the Tab key repeatedly. You should be able to reach every link, button, and form field in a logical order, always see which element is highlighted, and complete your contact form without a mouse. If the highlight vanishes or you get stuck, keyboard users will too.
Yes, they tend to pull in the same direction. Search engines read your site through structured markup rather than visual layout, much like a screen reader does. Descriptive links, proper heading structure, and image alt text all help both search engines and assistive technology at the same time.
