By Brian Christie
Not a legal lecture, a practical one
Web accessibility lawsuits against small businesses are real and increasing. But the legal angle isn’t even the main reason to care. The practical reason is simpler: accessible sites work better for everyone, not just people with disabilities. Keyboard navigation, proper contrast, descriptive alt text, clear form labels, all of these improve the experience for every visitor.
The common failures
1. Images with no alt text (screen readers read “image” and nothing else).
2. Low contrast text on a stylish background (looks good in the mockup, unreadable for anyone with vision issues).
3. Forms with no labels (sighted users guess from context, assistive tech gets nothing).
4. No keyboard navigation (try tabbing through your site without touching the mouse, see where it breaks).
The fixes are usually trivial
Add alt text to every image. Check your color contrast ratio (free tools do this in seconds). Label your form fields. Make sure buttons and links are reachable by keyboard. None of this requires a redesign, it’s mostly adding things that should have been there from the start.
The overlap with SEO
Here’s the part that usually gets attention: alt text, proper heading structure, and clean HTML are accessibility basics and SEO basics. Fixing one fixes the other. Two wins for the same work.
Want your site accessible and SEO-clean at the same time? That’s part of our web design service.
