Strategy
Website Accessibility: What Small Businesses Actually Need to Fix
By the Coast Creative team5 min read
Business owners bring up website accessibility for one of two reasons. Either a letter showed up from a law firm they've never heard of, or someone close to them uses a screen reader and they finally noticed their own site is a mess to navigate.
Both are good reasons to look. The trouble is that accessibility usually gets discussed as either a legal panic or a moral lecture, and neither tells you what to do on Monday morning. Here's the practical version: what the rules are, what breaks most often, and how to check your own site without hiring anyone.
The short version of the rules
The Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't name a technical standard for websites. What courts have leaned on instead is WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — and specifically version 2.1 at level AA. That's the bar most settlement agreements reference, and it's the one to design toward.
California matters more than most states. The Unruh Civil Rights Act attaches statutory damages to each violation, which is why so many demand letters come out of California, and why a business with fifteen employees can end up on the receiving end of one. I'm a designer, not a lawyer — if you've already received a letter, talk to an attorney before you touch anything. But most of this is preventable.
Five problems cause most of the complaints
Accessibility audits run hundreds of line items long. In practice, the same handful of issues show up over and over.
**Images with no alt text.** Every meaningful image needs a short text description. Decorative images — background textures, divider graphics — should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them instead of reading out a filename.
**Text you can barely read.** Light gray body copy on white, thin type laid over a photo, a pale button label. WCAG asks for a 4.5:1 contrast ratio on normal text. A surprising number of otherwise beautiful sites fail this on the hero section alone.
**Forms built on placeholder text.** If your contact form uses the gray hint text inside the field as the only label, that text disappears the moment someone starts typing, and screen readers handle it inconsistently. Every field needs a real label attached to it.
**Nothing works without a mouse.** Custom dropdowns, image sliders, and modal popups are the usual offenders. If a keyboard user can tab into your newsletter popup but can't tab out of it, they're stuck on your site with no way forward.
**Video with no captions.** A silent background video is fine. A founder telling the story of the company needs captions.
Check your own site in ten minutes
Open your homepage and put the mouse away. Press Tab repeatedly and watch where the highlight goes. You should always be able to see which element is selected, and the order should follow the page top to bottom. If the outline vanishes or jumps somewhere strange, that's a real finding.
Next, zoom the browser to 200%. Text should reflow and stay readable. If columns overlap or a menu disappears, that affects far more people than you'd guess.
Then run an automated check. In Chrome, open Developer Tools, go to the Lighthouse tab, and run the accessibility audit. The free axe DevTools extension is better and gives clearer fixes. Know the limit, though: automated tools catch roughly a third of real issues. They'll find contrast failures and missing alt text. They can't tell you whether your alt text is useful.
About those overlay widgets
You've probably seen the pitch — one line of JavaScript, and a floating accessibility button appears in the corner of your site promising compliance. They're marketed hard to small businesses because they sound like the easy button.
They don't fix your source code. They sit on top of it and patch problems at runtime, which works unevenly at best. Hundreds of screen reader users have publicly asked companies to stop using them, and lawsuits have been filed against businesses that had an overlay installed. Buying one is not a defense. Treat it as an extra sitting on top of a site that's already built correctly.
The same work counts twice
Nearly everything on the accessibility list is also on the search list. Descriptive alt text helps image search. Clean heading order — one H1, then H2s in sequence — helps crawlers understand your page. Link text that says "view our concrete services" instead of "click here" helps both. Captions and transcripts give search engines and AI assistants something to read.
Accessible markup is well-structured markup. You're not doing two jobs; you're doing one job that pays off in two places.
Build it in rather than bolting it on
Retrofitting accessibility into a finished site is slow, because the problems are usually structural — a navigation system that was never keyboard-friendly, a palette that fails contrast in six places. Building it in from the start costs almost nothing extra. Pick colors that pass, label your form fields, test with the keyboard before launch.
That's how we handle it on every build here — not an add-on line item, just part of doing the work properly. If your current site has you worried, start with the ten-minute check above. You'll learn more in that ten minutes than any sales pitch will tell you.