Your website may be the first place someone interacts with your business. They might visit to learn about your services, make a purchase, fill out a contact form, schedule an appointment, or simply find your phone number.
But can everyone actually use it?
Website accessibility is about creating an online experience that people with a wide range of abilities can navigate, understand, and interact with. For small businesses, that doesn’t have to mean approaching your website like a complicated technical or legal project. In many cases, accessibility comes down to thoughtful design choices that make your website work better for everyone.
The considerations below are informed by web accessibility guidance related to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which highlights common barriers that can make websites harder to use for people with disabilities.
Here are some of the places where businesses can start.
1. Website Accessibility Starts With Readability
A beautiful website isn’t very effective if visitors struggle to read it.
Text should have enough contrast against its background to remain easy to see. Light gray copy on a white background may look sleek, for example, but it can be difficult for someone with limited vision to read.
Color shouldn’t have to do all the work, either. Imagine a contact form that marks an incorrect field only by turning its border red. Someone who can’t easily distinguish that color may have no idea what went wrong.
Good design gives people more than one cue. Pairing color with a message such as “This field is required” makes the experience clearer for everyone.
2. Give Your Images Some Context
Images are an important part of telling your brand’s story, but not every visitor experiences them visually.
Alternative (alt) text provides a written description of an image that can be communicated through screen-reading technology. When an image adds meaningful information to the page, its alt text should briefly explain that purpose.
The keyword is meaningful. Alt text doesn’t need to become a paragraph describing every object in a photograph. It should give someone the context they need to understand what the image contributes.
It’s a relatively small content detail that can make a significant difference in website accessibility.
3. Make Video Work Without Sound
If your website includes videos, captions should be part of the plan.
Accurate, synchronized captions make spoken information available to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They also happen to be useful for someone watching from a quiet office, scrolling without headphones, or trying to follow along in a noisy environment.
This is a great example of how accessibility improvements frequently benefit a much broader audience.
4. Don’t Let Your Forms Become a Roadblock
Forms are often where website visitors turn into customers, leads, applicants, subscribers, or donors. That makes usability especially important
A good form should clearly tell someone what information belongs in each field. If something goes wrong, the error message should explain what needs to be corrected rather than leaving the person to figure it out.
Forms and other interactive parts of a website should also be usable without relying entirely on a mouse or trackpad. Some people navigate websites primarily with a keyboard or other assistive technology.
If someone makes it all the way to your contact or checkout form but can’t complete it, that’s not just an accessibility problem. It’s a business problem.
5. Use Headings to Create Real Structure
Headings do more than make a webpage easier to skim.
Behind the scenes, properly structured headings help communicate how the information on a page is organized. That’s particularly useful for people navigating with screen readers.
Think of headings as the outline of your page. A clear hierarchy helps visitors understand where they are, what each section covers, and how the content fits together.
This is another area where accessibility and good user experience overlap. Organized content is simply easier to use.
6. Let People Zoom and Navigate Their Way
Not every visitor interacts with a website in the same way.
Someone with limited vision may increase their browser zoom to make text larger. Someone who can’t comfortably use a mouse may navigate with a keyboard. Others may rely on assistive technologies to move through a page.
A website shouldn’t fall apart when people use those tools.
Responsive layouts, scalable text, logical navigation, and properly built interactive elements can help give visitors more flexibility in how they experience your site.
7. Accessibility Isn’t a One-Time Checkbox
One of the biggest misconceptions about website accessibility is that it’s something you “finish.”
Websites change constantly. New images are uploaded. Blog posts are published. Forms are added. Videos are embedded. Pages get redesigned.
Accessibility therefore needs to be considered as part of ongoing website management, not only during the initial build.
That might mean creating simple internal habits, such as adding alt text when uploading images, captioning new videos, maintaining clear heading structures, and checking new pages for readability before publishing them.
It’s also helpful to give visitors an easy way to contact you if they encounter an accessibility problem. Sometimes your users will notice something your team didn’t, and making it easy to hear from them gives you an opportunity to improve the experience.
Good Accessibility is Good Web Design
For a small business owner, website accessibility can sound like one more overwhelming item to add to an already long digital to-do list.
It doesn’t have to be.
At its core, accessibility asks many of the same questions that good web design already should:
- Can people read this?
- Can they navigate it?
- Do they understand what they’re being asked to do?
- Can they access the information they came here to find?
Considering those questions throughout design, development, and content creation helps remove unnecessary barriers while creating a clearer, more intuitive experience for your audience as a whole.
The specific accessibility obligations that apply to an organization can vary, so businesses with questions about ADA compliance should seek appropriate guidance for their situation. But when it comes to the website itself, there’s no reason to wait to make usability and inclusion a priority.
At Create180 Design, we build websites around the people who use them. Thoughtful website accessibility is one more way to make sure a great-looking website also helps your business connect with as much of its audience as possible.
