Somebody visited your website last week and left without doing what they came to do.
You have no record of it. They didn't call to complain. They didn't fill out the form because they couldn't. Your analytics logged a visit and a bounce, same as a thousand others, and nobody at your company will ever know the difference.
That's the thing about web accessibility. When it fails, it fails silently.
Most business owners we talk with have never given this topic much thought, and we understand why. It sounds like a technical topic, or a government topic, or a topic for companies much larger than theirs. It's really a customer topic, and that puts it in a different place on the priority list.
What we're actually talking about
Web accessibility means your website works for everyone who comes to it, no matter how they see it, hear it, or move through it.
That sounds abstract until you look at what goes wrong in practice. A few of the common areas that go wrong:
An image with no alt text. Alt text is the short description attached to an image in the page code. A screen reader, which reads a page aloud, announces that description. Without it, the visitor hears "image" or nothing at all. When the image is decorative, no harm done. When the image is your pricing chart, your menu, or the button that submits your form, that visitor just hit a wall.
A form field with no label attached to it. You see a box labeled "Email" next to it, and the connection is obvious. If those two things aren't linked in the code, a screen reader announces an empty field. The visitor is being asked to type something into a box, and nobody has told them what.
Both fields look the same on screen. Only one of them tells a screen reader what it's for.
">
Navigation that requires a mouse. Plenty of people navigate with the keyboard alone, moving through a page with the Tab key. If your drop-down menu only opens on hover, or your modal window traps them with no way out, they can't get where they're going.
Text that doesn't have enough contrast against its background. Light gray text on a white background looks clean in the design file. On an actual screen, in actual light, it can be genuinely unreadable.
A video with no captions. If the information is only in the audio, anyone who can't hear the audio doesn't get the information.
None of these are unusual or hard to understand. They're common, they're fixable, and most websites have several of them.
The people you're not picturing
Here's where most of the misunderstanding lives.
When business owners hear "accessibility," they picture a small group of people with significant disabilities, and they conclude, reasonably enough, that this isn't really their customer base.
The numbers tell a different story.
Your customers who don't hear well. Roughly 15% of American adults, about 37.5 million people, report some trouble hearing. Among adults 65 to 74, it's about one in three. Nearly half of those over 75 have difficulty hearing. (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders)
Not one of those people thinks of themselves as having a special need. They think of themselves as somebody who turns the TV up. But if your explainer video has no captions, they won't get your message.
Your customers whose eyes have changed. Presbyopia is the gradual loss of close-up focus that starts in your forties. It affects an estimated 128 million Americans, close to 90% of adults over 45. (American Optometric Association)
That's nearly nine out of ten. If your buyers are mostly over 45, and for a lot of businesses they are, then small type and low contrast aren't an edge case. That's your core audience, squinting at a phone in a parking lot.
Your customers who see color differently. Around 8% of men have some form of color vision deficiency, roughly one in twelve. (National Eye Institute) If your form marks required fields in red and does nothing else to flag them, one man in twelve isn't seeing what you think he's seeing.
Everybody else, some of the time. Somebody watching your video with the sound off because they're in a waiting room. Somebody on a phone in bright sunlight where low-contrast text disappears. Somebody with one hand on a coffee cup. Accessible design tends to help these people too, which is why it so often just reads as better design.
Here's the shift we'd ask you to make. Accessibility is not a narrow accommodation for a small group. It's the difference between a website that works for your entire market and one that works for the portion of your market that happens to see, hear, and move the way your designer does.
Why you've never heard a complaint about it
Because almost nobody complains.
Think about your own behavior. When a website frustrates you, you don't email the company. You go somewhere else. Visitors who can't use your site do exactly the same thing, and they've usually had that experience often enough that they've stopped expecting anything different.
So the feedback loop that normally protects you is missing. Your bounce rate goes up a little. A form conversion rate sits lower than it should. You assume the copy needs work or the offer isn't strong enough, and you never find the actual cause because the actual cause doesn't show up in any report you're looking at.
There is a standard, and it's not new
Accessibility isn't a matter of opinion. There's a published technical standard.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, come from the World Wide Web Consortium, the international body that sets web standards. The current version is WCAG 2.2, published as a formal Recommendation in October 2023. (W3C)
WCAG has three conformance levels. Level A is the most basic. Level AA is the moderate level. Level AAA is the most comprehensive, and it's generally considered impractical to meet across an entire site. Level AA is the benchmark that essentially everything points to in practice.
If you want a sense of where this is heading, look at where it already applies. Federal agencies have been required to meet WCAG-based standards for their electronic content since 2018. (Section508.gov) Similar requirements are now working their way toward state and local government, and organizations that do business with those entities tend to get pulled along through contracts and procurement.
We're not going to make predictions about what happens next. What we will say is that the standard has been written for years, your customers already need it, and neither of those things depends on what any rule eventually says.
What to do about it
Our honest advice is straightforward. Find out where your website actually stands, then build a plan to close the gap. Not a panic. A plan.
Find out where you stand. You cannot plan around a problem you haven't measured, which means conducting an actual evaluation rather than a guess.
Two free tools will get you started in about ten minutes:
- WAVE, from WebAIM: A nonprofit based at Utah State University. Paste in a page address at wave.webaim.org, and it marks problems directly on the page so you can see where they are. There's also a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
- axe DevTools: From Deque, a free browser extension that scans a page and lists each issue with its location in the code and a suggested fix.
Run one of them on your home page and your contact page today, just to see the shape of things. Then understand the limitation: automated scans only catch part of the problem and no more. WebAIM says so plainly in their own evaluation guide and also recommends testing with a keyboard and a screen reader. Adobe's documentation makes the same point about PDFs, noting that its checker flags certain items for manual review rather than resolving them automatically.
Start with the pages that matter. You don't need to fix everything at once, and trying to will stall the whole effort. Start where people convert: your contact form, quote request, scheduler, and checkout. Those are the pages where an accessibility problem costs you a customer today.
Remember it's not just the web pages. Your PDFs need proper structure to be read correctly. Your videos need captions. Your images need alt text that carries the actual information rather than a vague label. Downloadable documents in particular tend to get overlooked completely.
Check the pieces you didn't build. Your embedded scheduler, your payment window, your chat widget, the plugin that's been running since the last redesign. Third-party components are frequently where accessibility falls apart, and they're the part of your site you have the least visibility into.
Build it in going forward. It costs a fraction as much to build content accessibly the first time as it does to go back and remediate it later. If a redesign is anywhere in your future, that's the moment to set the standard. If it isn't, this becomes a matter of habits: how you write alt text, how you structure headings, how you caption video.
Treat it as ongoing. Websites change every week. New pages, new photos, new documents, new staff. Accessibility drifts the same way everything else does when nobody's watching.
One useful side effect. A lot of this work overlaps with technical SEO. Descriptive alt text, a real heading structure, meaningful link text, clean semantic markup. Search engines and screen readers are trying to do the same thing: understand a page without looking at it. Work that helps one usually helps the other. It's one more reason accessibility belongs inside your digital marketing strategy rather than on a separate someday list.
The bottom line
Your website exists to let people do business with you. Right now, some portion of the people who want to are being turned away by details nobody at your company has ever looked at.
That's worth taking seriously on its own terms, separate from any question about what rules may or may not eventually apply. Your customers are getting older. Their eyes are changing, their hearing is changing, and the number of them who need your site to work a little harder goes up every year.
Start by finding out where you stand. Everything else follows from that.
If you'd like help evaluating your site or building a plan, give us a call at 877.437.4989 or reach out through our website. We're happy to walk through it with you.
