In most cases, your private sector website must meet accessibility standards. It is easy to think that accessibility standards only apply to government websites. However, that assumption is incorrect regarding the law and accessibility standards are becoming more common for private websites. Imagine if a customer with a disability is unable to complete your contact form on your website because he or she uses a screen reader. It is the same as a broken contact form. A potential customer leaves without completing a form, and you probably never thought of it, but he or she may have left your website to never return.
Most small business websites have serious issues that are easily fixable before they ever reach any significant level of website accessibility. Color contrast affects most websites the most. Just because a color choice may look good to you, it does not make it accessible. For example, a light gray color text on a white background typically stands out without any issues. However, for people with low vision or those that are color blind, that same text combination may be nearly unreadable. It is easy to check your color choice for accessibility with the Web Content Accessibility Guides. WebAIM is a free online service that will quickly analyze if your website meets the guidelines for text and background color combinations.
Another problem is missing alt tags. Without an alt tag, a screen reader either ignores the image or says the image file name, so a blind person hears “IMG4471.jpg” and a sighted person sees the image of your workshop or product line. This is one of the easiest problems to solve on a website. Most of the time it requires someone to go through the media library and add short alt tags to each image. This is a quick and easy way to fix a design or coding problem.
The problem that people most often run into is inaccessible keyboard navigation. This is out of sight to most because most people navigate the internet using a mouse. Many people, including people with limited motor skills, navigate the internet solely using a keyboard and tabbing from input to input. If an important interaction on the website is only available with a keyboard navigation activity that is generally unavailable, a prospective client will not be able to complete the goal of the interaction and there are no visual clues to even indicate to the user that something so important is missing. A quick way to test this is to go to your home page and see if you can navigate from your home page to a completed contact form submission with only the use of the Tab key and the Enter key.
Beyond these basics, you should perform an audit as opposed to a quick manual check to assess heading structure, ARIA labels for custom interactive components such as sliders or accordions, and focus and hover states, especially if your website captures payments or bookings. The cost of an abandonment for that type of transaction is higher, and it does not require you to start from scratch. For all other pages, issues with contrast tend to be solved by a stylesheet modification, and alt text is a content issue, while keyboard navigation tends to be resolved by adjusting how a menu or form is structured, as opposed to replacing that menu or form. It does, however, require you to test for these issues instead of assuming your website is fine because it looks fine in your browser.
