Most small business owners hear "website accessibility" and file it under legal risk — something to worry about if a letter ever shows up. That framing makes it easy to postpone forever.
The practical version is more useful. Roughly one in four US adults lives with a disability, and a good share of them are trying to use your website right now. Low vision, colorblindness, arthritis, a temporary injury, or just being 68 years old on a phone in bright sunlight. None of them will email to tell you your site didn't work. They'll leave, exactly like any other visitor who hits friction.
The four problems that cause most of the trouble
Accessibility guidelines run to hundreds of pages. For a typical small-business website, four issues account for the overwhelming majority of real-world problems.
Text you can't read
Light grey text on a white background looks refined in a design mockup and disappears in a parking lot. Contrast is measured as a ratio, and the working threshold is 4.5:1 for normal text. Plenty of free checkers will score a color pair in seconds. This is the single most common failure and the easiest to fix — it's usually one value in a stylesheet.
Images that say nothing
Screen readers announce an image by its alt text. Alt text that reads "IMG_4021" or is missing entirely turns your gallery into dead air. Describe what the image shows and why it's there: "Technician replacing a water heater in a finished basement" beats "water heater photo." Purely decorative images should carry empty alt text so screen readers skip them instead of reading a filename aloud.
Anything that needs a mouse
Some visitors navigate entirely by keyboard. Tab through your own site sometime: can you reach the phone number, open the menu, and submit the contact form without touching the mouse? Can you see where you are as you go? Dropdown menus that only open on hover and custom buttons built out of unlabeled divs are the usual offenders.
Forms that don't explain themselves
A form field needs a real label, not just placeholder text — placeholders vanish the moment someone starts typing, which is precisely when a person who's lost their place needs it most. Error messages need to name the problem in words: "Enter a phone number with area code," not a red outline and silence.
The legal question, answered plainly
Businesses do receive ADA demand letters over inaccessible websites, and the volume has grown year over year. Most target obvious, automatically-detectable failures — missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, contrast — because those are cheap to find at scale.
That's the useful takeaway, and it isn't legal advice: the issues that draw letters are the same ones on the list above. Fixing them for your customers' sake is also the practical risk reduction. You don't need a certification or an audit badge to be in far better shape than most of your competitors.
Why this overlaps with everything else you want
The accessibility fixes are mostly the same work as the fixes that help everyone:
- Alt text describes your images to search engines as well as screen readers.
- Proper heading structure is what lets both assistive tech and AI answer engines understand your page.
- Labeled form fields raise completion rates for every visitor, not just some.
- Bigger tap targets and readable text are what mobile visitors needed anyway.
That's why it's worth doing even setting the legal question aside entirely. There is very little here that helps only one group.
Where to start this week
Run one page — your homepage — through a free automated checker. It'll catch contrast and missing alt text in under a minute. Then tab through that same page with your hands off the mouse. Between those two passes you'll find most of what's actually wrong, and none of it requires a developer to diagnose.
If you'd rather not audit your own site, tell us about your business — we build these basics in from the first draft, so accessibility never becomes a project you have to schedule.