Here's the reframe that makes accessibility click: it's not a checklist for a small edge case, it's designing for the situations everyone ends up in sooner or later. Low contrast doesn't just block someone with low vision — it blocks you, reading your own site on your phone in direct sunlight. Captions don't just help someone who's deaf — they help the person scrolling on the train with the sound off, which by now is most people, most of the time. Keyboard navigation doesn't just help someone with a motor impairment — it helps the person whose trackpad just died mid-checkout. Good accessibility is good design wearing a more precise name.
Contrast: get the numbers right, not just "looks fine to me"
The official standard here — WCAG 2.2, Level AA — sets clear, testable numbers: body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and large text (18pt / 24px and above, or 14pt / roughly 18.7px bold and above) needs at least 3:1. These aren't arbitrary; they're calibrated to what most people with low vision, ageing eyesight, or a glare-washed phone screen can still read comfortably.
You don't need to eyeball this. Free contrast checkers (WebAIM's is the standard one) let you paste in your text colour and background colour and get an instant pass or fail. Light grey text on a white background is the single most common failure we see on small business sites — it looks "clean" on a calibrated laptop screen and becomes unreadable on a phone outdoors.
Alt text that actually says something
Alt text is the short description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load. The most common mistake isn't missing alt text — it's lazy alt text: "image1.jpg," or "photo," or stuffing it with keywords for search engines. Good alt text describes what matters about the image in context. For a product photo, that's the product and its relevant detail ("navy wool coat, front view, tortoiseshell buttons"), not "our beautiful new coat we're so excited about." For a purely decorative image — a background texture, a divider — the correct alt text is an empty one (alt=""), so screen readers skip it instead of reading out noise.
Keyboard navigation and focus states
Not everyone uses a mouse or a finger — some people navigate entirely by keyboard, tabbing from link to link and button to button. Two things make or break this: a sensible tab order (following the visual, logical order of the page, not jumping randomly) and a clearly visible focus state — an outline or highlight that shows exactly which element is currently selected. Removing focus outlines for looks (a common but outdated practice) leaves keyboard users with no way to tell where they are on the page. WCAG 2.2 also added a concrete rule for touch and click targets: interactive elements like buttons and links should generally be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, so they're easy to hit accurately — which, not coincidentally, is also just easier for anyone tapping on a small phone screen.
Captions on video and audio content
If your site includes any video — a promo clip, a walkthrough, a customer testimonial — captions matter for a far bigger audience than people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Think about how much video content today gets watched with the sound off by default: on a train, in a waiting room, at a desk next to colleagues. Without captions, that entire audience scrolls straight past without understanding a word you said, and you've quietly lost them. Auto-generated captions from most video platforms are a reasonable starting point, but they're worth a quick proofread before you publish — a misheard word in an auto-caption can look careless, or worse, say something inaccurate about what you actually offer.
Form labels and heading order
Two quiet structural habits do a lot of work:
- Every form field needs a real, connected label — not just placeholder text that vanishes the moment someone starts typing. Placeholder-only forms are a common source of confusion for everyone, not only screen reader users, because the hint disappears exactly when you need to check it.
- Headings should nest in order — one H1 per page, then H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections within those, without skipping levels. Screen reader users often navigate a page heading-by-heading, the way a sighted user skims a page visually; a broken heading order is like a table of contents with the sections shuffled.
Curious whether your current site has any of these gaps? A free analysis checks the basics in minutes.
Get your free website analysis →The legal direction in the EU — honestly, without the scare tactics
Two separate EU rules matter here, and it's worth being precise about which applies to you. The older one, the Web Accessibility Directive, has applied since 2020 (2021 for apps) but only to public sector bodies — government agencies, municipalities, public schools, and similar. If you run a private business, that one doesn't apply to you directly.
The newer one, the European Accessibility Act, took effect on 28 June 2025 and is broader: it covers e-commerce and a range of digital services sold to consumers in the EU, requiring them to meet accessibility standards equivalent to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. There's a real, meaningful exemption for very small businesses — micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in annual turnover or balance sheet are generally exempt from the Act's service-provider obligations. Services that already existed before the deadline also get a transition period, generally until 2030 or their next major update, whichever comes first.
What this means practically: if you're a small local business with a simple, non-transactional website, you likely fall outside the strictest requirements today — but "likely exempt right now" isn't the same as "never worth doing," and the exemption thresholds don't cover every situation, especially if you sell online or plan to grow. This isn't legal advice, and the exact scope can turn on details specific to your business, so if you're genuinely unsure whether you're in scope, a short conversation with a lawyer is worth more than guessing. Either way, the basics in this article cost little to fix and make your site better for every visitor, regulation or not.
A starter checklist
- Run your main text colours through a contrast checker — fix anything below 4.5:1 (body text) or 3:1 (large text).
- Rewrite alt text on your key images so it describes what's actually there, and leave it empty on purely decorative images.
- Tab through your own site with the mouse untouched — check you can reach and see every link, button, and form field.
- Check every form field has a visible, permanent label, not just a placeholder.
- Check your headings run in order: one H1, then H2s, then H3s, with nothing skipped.
None of this requires a redesign. Most of it is an afternoon of careful edits — and every single item on that list makes the site better for a visitor who has nothing to do with disability at all: someone outdoors, someone one-handed on a phone, someone in a hurry.