• The ORB Team
• Accessibility

Website Accessibility: The Basics For Small Businesses

Website accessibility means making sure everyone can use your site, including people with sight loss, hearing loss, limited movement or conditions that affect reading and concentration. It also helps people in everyday situations, like reading a phone in bright sunshine or using one hand while holding a toddler. For small businesses, the basics are not complicated, and most of them make the site better for every visitor.

Why It Matters For Your Business

If someone cannot read your prices, fill in your contact form or find your phone number, they will go elsewhere. That is lost work, and it is easy to avoid. There is a legal side too. In general terms, UK equality law expects service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that can include websites. Public sector bodies have specific accessibility rules, which you can read about on GOV.UK's accessibility requirements page. Private businesses are not covered by those exact rules, but they are a useful guide to what good looks like.

What Is WCAG?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG, are the international standard for accessible websites. They are published by the W3C, and you can read an overview of WCAG on their site. The guidelines have three levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the usual target for businesses and public bodies. The guidelines are built around four ideas. Your site should be:

• Perceivable: people can see or hear the content, or get it another way.
• Operable: people can move around and use it, including with a keyboard.
• Understandable: the content and controls make sense.
• Compatible: it works with different browsers and assistive tools like screen readers.

You do not need to learn the full guidelines. Start with the common problems below, which cover a large share of what trips people up on small business sites.

Colour And Contrast

Pale grey text on a white background looks stylish to some designers but is hard for many people to read. Make sure text stands out clearly from its background. The same goes for buttons and links. Also avoid using colour alone to carry meaning. If a form says "fields in red are required", someone with colour blindness may miss it. Add a word or a symbol as well.

Text That Is Easy To Read

• Use a clear font at a comfortable size, especially on mobile.
• Keep paragraphs short and use headings to break up longer pages.
• Write in plain English. Explain any trade terms the first time you use them.
• Avoid long blocks of text in capitals or italics.
• Make sure people can zoom in without the page breaking.

Images And Alt Text

Screen readers read out the alt text of an image. Good alt text describes what matters in the picture in a short sentence, such as "New oak kitchen with white worktops". Purely decorative images can have empty alt text so screen readers skip them. Avoid putting important words inside images, like opening hours or prices on a banner, because they cannot be read out or resized.

Links And Buttons

Links should say where they go. "Read more" or "click here" means little when a screen reader lists all the links on a page. "View our kitchen fitting prices" is much clearer. Buttons should be big enough to tap with a thumb and spaced so people do not hit the wrong one.

Forms That Work For Everyone

Contact forms are where many small business sites fall down, and they are also where enquiries come from. Each field needs a proper label, not just grey placeholder text that disappears when you start typing. Error messages should say what went wrong and how to fix it. If you use a CAPTCHA, choose one that does not rely only on picking out blurry images.

Keyboard And Video

Some people cannot use a mouse. Try pressing the Tab key on your own site. You should be able to move through every link, button and form field in a sensible order and see where you are. If you use videos, add captions, and never set video or sound to play automatically.

A Five-Minute Check You Can Do Today

• Open your site on your phone and zoom in. Does anything overlap or disappear?
• Tab through your homepage and contact form without touching the mouse.
• Look for any light grey or low-contrast text.
• Check your main images have sensible alt text.
• Read your contact form labels. Are they clear without the placeholder text?

This will not catch everything, but it will show you the most obvious problems quickly.

Sectors Where It Matters Even More

Some organisations serve many people who rely on accessible websites. GP practices are a clear example, and our page on websites for GP surgeries covers what patients expect. Schools, nurseries and training providers are another, as parents, pupils and learners all need to find information quickly. We talk about this on our education website design page.

Building Accessibility In From The Start

It is far easier to build an accessible site than to fix one later. When we create new websites for small businesses, contrast, headings, alt text, labelled forms and keyboard use are part of the build rather than an extra. For existing sites, small fixes often make a big difference, and they can be handled as part of regular website maintenance. If you are not sure where your site stands, get in touch and we will take a look with you.