"Accessibility" sounds like a compliance project — audits, acronyms, a consultant's invoice. For a small-business site, the truth is friendlier: six habits cover most of it, every one of them doubles as better design for everyone, and the audience isn't hypothetical. Roughly one in five of your visitors is navigating with some impairment right now — including the customer reading your menu on a sunlit phone with one free hand.

Who this is actually for (everyone, eventually)

The accessibility audience is three overlapping groups, and only the first comes to mind unprompted: people with permanent impairments (low vision, motor difficulties, screen-reader users), people with temporary ones (the broken wrist, the eye procedure, the migraine), and everyone with situational ones — bright sunlight, a sleeping baby on one arm, a bumpy bus. Design for the first group and the other two are carried along free.

For local businesses there's a quieter demographic truth: your customer base ages with your town, and vision and dexterity decline gently for everyone. The 62-year-old homeowner trying to book your service with reading glasses pushed up on her head isn't an edge case — she's the median buyer for half the trades. And the machines are in the audience too: search engines read your site exactly the way assistive tech does — structure, text, labels — which is why nearly everything below also shows up in our page SEO guide. Accessibility and SEO are the same machine-readability, sold to different bosses.

The six basics

Alt text: describe the job, not the pixels

Alt text answers "what would I lose if this image vanished?" For your portfolio shot, that's "finished kitchen with white shaker cabinets and a walnut island" — not "image" or a keyword pile. For a purely decorative flourish, the honest answer is nothing, and empty alt is correct — it tells a screen reader to skip rather than mumble a filename. Build the habit where images live: when assets go into the media library, described once, every page that reuses them inherits the description.

Contrast: the epidemic is light gray on white

The most common failure on small-business sites isn't exotic — it's elegant pale gray text that was readable on the designer's bright monitor and is invisible on a five-year-old phone outdoors. The fix belongs in your site design styles, not on individual pages: set body text dark enough and accent-on-background combinations strong enough once, and every page inherits legibility — the same decide-once logic as everything else in your design system. The free test: your phone, screen brightness halved, outside at noon.

Headings: structure, not styling

Screen-reader users navigate by heading outline the way you skim by eye — h1 says what the page is, h2s are its sections, h3s their details. Two sins break this: making text big and bold instead of using a real heading (invisible to the outline), and choosing heading levels for their font size (a lie in the outline). Use levels in order, never skipping for looks — the same clean structure your SEO already wants, one craft serving both bosses.

Links that say where they go

A screen reader can jump link to link — and a page of "click here," "read more," "this page" is a row of identical unmarked doors. Write the destination into the link: "see our wedding pricing" beats "click here for pricing info." Sighted scanners read the same way, eyes jumping to the teal underlines; descriptive links serve them identically.

Forms: visible labels, kind errors

Placeholder-only fields — where the label sits inside the box and vanishes when you type — fail everyone at once: forget what the field wanted mid-typing and the answer is gone. Visible labels above fields, every time, and error messages that name the problem and the fix ("phone number needs an area code") rather than reddening silently. This is form field design 101, and on the page where money changes hands it's also pure conversion: every confused field is an abandoned lead.

Keyboard and thumb: can you reach everything?

Some visitors never touch a mouse — motor impairments, power users, broken trackpads. The test costs one minute: put the mouse down and Tab through your page. Can you reach the menu, the form, the book button? Can you see where you are as you go? The thumb version for phones: are buttons big enough to hit without zooming, with enough space that "Book" and "Cancel" aren't gambling neighbors?

Bake it in — the checklist should retire itself

The six habits fail as a checklist for the same reason every checklist fails: busy Tuesdays. They succeed as defaults: contrast lives in the design styles, labeled form patterns and heading structure live in your templates and sections, alt text lives with the asset in the library. Fix each thing once where it's defined, and every future page — including the ones AI builds from your descriptions — inherits the fix. Accessibility as a property of the system, not a virtue of the author.

Then the audit becomes maintenance, twenty minutes a quarter alongside your navigation pass: the squint test on new pages, the tab test on anything interactive, the phone-in-sunlight test on whatever you shipped recently, and one read of a key page's heading outline. Four small tests, most of the coverage, no consultant's invoice.

Frequently asked questions

Ready to make the site everyone can use? Faster puts the fixes where they stick — design styles for contrast, templates that carry structure, a media library that remembers your alt text. Start free and run the squint test today.