Most small business owners have never thought about whether their website works for someone using a screen reader, or someone who can't use a mouse, or someone who's colorblind. It's not that they don't care. It's that no one told them it mattered, until a demand letter showed up.
Website accessibility lawsuits against small businesses have been climbing for years, and they're not slowing down. But even if legal risk weren't part of the picture, accessibility is worth getting right for a simpler reason: it's how a meaningful share of your potential customers actually experience the internet.
Here's what accessibility means in practice, and what's realistic for a small business to do about it.
What "Accessible" Actually Means
An accessible website is one that people with disabilities can use, not just view. That includes people who are blind or low-vision and rely on screen readers, people with motor impairments who navigate by keyboard instead of a mouse, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and people with cognitive or learning disabilities who benefit from clear structure and plain language.
The standard most businesses get measured against, whether they know it or not, is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It's not a law itself, but it's the technical benchmark that courts and regulators point to when they evaluate ADA compliance for websites.
You don't need to memorize WCAG. You need to know the handful of things that cause most of the problems.
Where Small Business Websites Usually Fall Short
Images Without Alt Text
Every meaningful image on your site should have a short text description behind it, called alt text, that a screen reader can announce. Without it, a screen reader either skips the image entirely or reads out the filename, which is useless at best and confusing at worst.
This is one of the easiest fixes on this list, and often the one most commonly skipped.
Low Contrast Text
Light gray text on a white background looks clean in a mockup. For anyone with low vision, or anyone reading on their phone in bright sunlight, it's unreadable. Contrast between text and background is measurable, not subjective, and it's one of the most common accessibility failures on small business sites.
Forms That Only Work With a Mouse
Contact forms, booking widgets, and checkout flows need to work for someone tabbing through with a keyboard. If a form field can't be reached or submitted without a mouse, you've locked out anyone who navigates that way, often at the exact moment a visitor was ready to become a customer.
Video Without Captions
If you're using video on your site, whether testimonials, product demos, or explainer content, captions make it usable for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and for the large share of visitors who watch with the sound off regardless.
Vague Link Text
"Click here" and "Learn more" tell a screen reader user nothing about where a link goes. Link text should describe the destination on its own, even out of context.
Why This Matters Beyond the Legal Risk
Legal exposure is real, and it's worth taking seriously (demand letters over inaccessible websites have hit businesses far smaller than you'd expect). But treating accessibility purely as legal defense misses the actual opportunity.
Roughly one in four adults in the U.S. lives with a disability. An inaccessible website isn't a minor inconvenience for that group, it's a locked door. If your competitor's site works for them and yours doesn't, you've made the decision easy for them.
Accessible design also tends to be better design, period. Clear contrast, logical structure, descriptive links, and keyboard-friendly navigation improve the experience for every visitor, not just the ones accessibility rules were written for.
What to Actually Do About It
You don't need a full accessibility audit to make real progress. Start here:
Run your homepage through a free tool like WAVE or Lighthouse and see what it flags. Add alt text to your images, especially product photos and anything with meaningful content. Check your text and background colors against a contrast checker. Try tabbing through your own site with a keyboard, no mouse, and see where you get stuck. Add captions to any video content you're using.
If you're working with a designer or developer on a new site or a redesign, ask directly whether accessibility is part of the build, not bolted on afterward, but built into the structure from the start. It's far cheaper to do this during development than to retrofit it later.
We build accessibility into every site we design, not as an add-on but as part of how the site is structured from day one. If you're not sure where your current site stands, our website design work includes an honest look at what needs attention. Let's talk about your project.
Further reading: 5 Signs Your Website Is Costing You Clients · When Is It Time to Redesign Your Website?