Website
accessibility

Website accessibility in plain English

Website accessibility means a person can use your site whatever their abilities: someone who navigates with a keyboard because of a tremor, someone who listens to pages through a screen reader, someone who zooms text to 200%, someone colorblind, someone older whose eyes tire on small gray text. Millions of Americans live with a disability, and many more have temporary or age-related limits: a broken wrist, cataracts, reading glasses left in the car. For a local business, that's a real share of customers.

Good accessibility also helps everyone else. Clear headings, readable contrast, large tap targets and forms with proper labels make a site easier on a phone in bright sunlight, too.

The ADA and why websites get sued

The Americans with Disabilities Act was written before the modern web, and it doesn't contain a detailed rulebook for private business websites. In practice, though, courts and plaintiffs' lawyers widely apply it to them, particularly when the business also serves customers in person. Demand letters and lawsuits about websites arrive in large numbers every year, with New York, California and Florida among the busiest places. Small businesses are frequent targets because their sites often have obvious, easy-to-document barriers.

WCAG 2.1 at level AA is the standard most often used as the yardstick in these claims and in settlements. I'm not a lawyer and can't tell you your legal risk; for that, talk to your attorney. What I can do is build a site that meets the technical practices those claims are measured against. The background is in ADA website accessibility.

What I check on every site

• Structure: one H1, logical heading order, landmarks for header, navigation, main content and footer.
• Text alternatives: meaningful alt text on informative images, empty alt on decorative ones.
• Color and contrast: at least AA ratios, and color never used as the only signal.
• Keyboard: everything reachable and usable by Tab, Enter and Space, with a visible focus outline and no traps.
• Forms: visible labels, instructions before fields, errors described in text and announced to screen readers.
• Zoom and reflow: content readable at 200% zoom and on narrow screens without sideways scrolling.
• Motion: respect for the reduced-motion setting, pausable carousels, nothing flashing.

Barriers I see most often

On sites I review, the same problems repeat: phone numbers and prices placed inside images, light gray text on white, icon-only buttons with no label, booking widgets that can't be used with a keyboard, PDF menus that screen readers can't read, and pop-ups that grab focus and can't be closed. Each of these is cheap to avoid when building and fiddly to patch afterward. That's one reason I rebuild rather than retrofit, as described on website redesign.

Content you add later

A site can launch accessible and slowly stop being so as new content goes in. The edit panel I build asks for alt text when you upload an image, keeps heading levels in order and doesn't let you paste text as a picture. I also give you a one-page guide: how to write link text, when to use headings, how to caption a video. Accessible design starts with the interface itself, covered under UX/UI design.

An accessibility statement

I'll draft a short accessibility statement for your site: what standard you aim for, what's known to be imperfect and how people can reach you if they hit a barrier. Your attorney should review it before it goes live. You can see how this site handles it on its own accessibility page.