Why website accessibility matters for a small business

It affects more people than you'd guess

The CDC estimates more than 1 in 4 U.S. adults live with some type of disability. That includes vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities — a meaningful share of anyone's potential customers.

Almost every site has issues

This isn't a niche problem. WebAIM's annual analysis of the top one million home pages found automatically detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of home pages — and that's only counting issues a machine can detect; the real number is likely higher. The most common problems are unglamorous and fixable: low-contrast text (found on 83.9% of pages), missing image alt text (53.1%), and unlabeled form fields (51%).

There's also legal exposure

In the US, the Department of Justice has stated that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the websites of businesses open to the public. Businesses — including small ones — sometimes first learn about an accessibility problem through a legal demand letter rather than a customer complaint, which is a worse way to find out.

The fixes are usually small

The point of all this isn't to alarm you — it's that the most common issues (contrast, alt text, form labels) are typically quick to fix once you know exactly where they are. That's what a scan is for.

Run a free scan of your site to see where it stands.