Website Accessibility: Simple Fixes for Small Businesses
By Neha
A grandfather wants to book a health check-up for his wife. He opens the lab's website on his phone. The text is pale grey on white and far too small. He tries to pinch the screen to make it bigger, and the page will not zoom. The "Book now" button is a thin line of text squeezed between two others, and his thumb keeps hitting the wrong one. He gives up and calls a different lab.
Nothing on that website was broken. It simply was not built for him.
Website accessibility means building a site that people can use whatever their eyesight, hearing, hands, age or device. It sounds like a specialist subject, and at the far end it is. But most of the damage on small business websites comes from about ten ordinary mistakes, and most of them can be fixed in an afternoon. This guide walks through them.
Who you are building for
It is easy to picture accessibility as something for a small group of people. The group is not small, and at some point it includes everyone.
- People with a lasting disability. The 2011 census counted about 2.7 crore people with disabilities in India, and most experts consider that an undercount. Many use a screen reader, software that reads a page aloud, or a magnifier.
- Older customers. Eyesight and steadiness of hand decline with age. Your customers' parents are online now, and they often make the family's decisions about doctors, travel and jewellery.
- People in a difficult moment. Someone reading your menu in bright sunlight. Someone holding a child in one arm. Someone with a cracked screen, or on a train with the sound off.
- People on slow connections. When images fail to load, the text descriptions behind them are all the visitor gets.
A site that works for the first group works better for all the others.
Why it is worth an afternoon
- More enquiries. Every visitor who cannot read your prices or tap your call button is a customer you paid to attract and then lost.
- Better standing with Google. Many accessibility fixes are also search fixes: clear headings, described images, readable text and pages that work on a phone. Our on-page SEO checklist overlaps with this guide more than you might expect.
- The law is moving this way. India's Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 asks service providers to make their services accessible, and government websites already follow published accessibility guidelines. Private businesses are rarely chased today, but schools, hospitals, banks and anyone supplying the government are increasingly asked about it.
The international standard is called WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You do not need to read it. The ten fixes below cover the parts that matter most for a small site.
Ten fixes, in order of impact
1. Make text easy to see
Pale grey text on a white background is the most common accessibility failure on the web. Fashionable, and unreadable outdoors.
The measure is called contrast: the difference in brightness between text and its background. The guideline asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. You do not need to calculate it. Dark text on a light background, or white text on a strong dark colour, passes. Light grey on white, yellow on white and text laid over a busy photo usually fail.
2. Use a readable size, and allow zoom
Body text should be at least 16 pixels on a phone. Smaller than that and many people over forty reach for their glasses.
Also check that visitors can pinch to zoom. Some website themes switch zooming off to keep the design tidy. That one setting locks out a large number of people. Ask your developer to remove any "user-scalable=no" or "maximum-scale=1" from the page.
3. Describe your images
Every meaningful image needs alt text, a short written description that a screen reader speaks aloud and that appears when the image fails to load. "Bride in a red Banarasi saree with gold zari border" is useful. "IMG_4471" and "image" are not.
Purely decorative images, such as a background swirl, should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
The image alt checker lists every image on a page that is missing a description. Our guide to image SEO and alt text shows how to write good ones.
4. Use real headings, in order
Screen reader users jump through a page by its headings, the way you skim a newspaper by its headlines. That only works if headings are marked as headings, not just made big and bold, and if they follow an order: one main heading, then sections, then sub-sections.
The heading checker shows the outline of any page so you can see skipped levels and missing headings at a glance.
5. Make buttons and links big enough to tap
A finger is not a mouse pointer. Buttons and links should be roughly 48 pixels tall and wide, about the size of a fingertip, with space between them. Phone numbers, WhatsApp buttons and menu items are the ones to check first, because they are the ones that earn you money.
6. Write links that make sense alone
A screen reader can list all the links on a page. A list that reads "click here, click here, read more, click here" is useless. Write the destination into the link: "See our wedding packages", "Download the price list". This helps Google understand the linked page too.
7. Label every form field
Many forms show the hint inside the box, such as "Your phone number", and the hint vanishes the moment you start typing. People forget what the box was for, and screen readers often cannot read the hint at all.
Put a visible label above each field. Mark required fields in words, not only with a red star. When something is wrong, say what and where: "Phone number should have 10 digits", not just a red border.
8. Do not rely on colour alone
Several men in every hundred have some difficulty telling red from green. If your booking calendar shows available dates in green and full dates in red, with nothing else, those visitors cannot use it. Add a word, an icon or a pattern as well as the colour.
9. Make it work without a mouse
Some people cannot use a mouse or touchscreen and move around with a keyboard instead. Test it on a laptop: press the Tab key repeatedly. You should see a clear outline move from link to link, in a sensible order, and be able to open the menu and send the form with the Enter key. If the outline disappears or gets trapped in a pop-up, your developer needs to know.
10. Caption your videos and calm the motion
Most people watch videos on their phone with the sound off, and some cannot hear them at all. Add captions. YouTube creates automatic ones that you can correct in a few minutes.
Avoid videos that play by themselves with sound, sliders that move before anyone can read them, and anything that flashes. If something must move, give visitors a way to pause it.
Write in plain language
Accessibility is not only about code. Long sentences, legal wording and unexplained terms shut out people with reading difficulties, people reading in their second or third language, and people in a hurry.
Short sentences. Common words. One idea per paragraph. The readability checker scores a piece of text and points to the sentences that are hard work.
How to test your site in ten minutes
- Run the automatic check. Enter your home page in the accessibility and best practices checker. It uses Google's own tests and explains every failed check and how to fix it.
- Do the zoom test. On your phone, pinch to zoom the page to double size. Can you? Does the text still fit without scrolling sideways?
- Do the sunlight test. Take your phone outside and read your prices and phone number.
- Do the keyboard test described above.
- Ask an older relative to find your phone number and book or enquire, without help. Watch where they get stuck. This is the most useful test of all.
A caution about scores: automatic tools catch only a part of accessibility problems, perhaps a third. A score of 100 means the machine found nothing, not that the site is perfect. The human tests matter as much.
Be careful with "accessibility widgets"
Some companies sell a floating button that claims to make any website accessible with one line of code. These overlays do not fix the underlying page, often interfere with the screen readers people already use, and have been widely criticised by disabled users themselves. Spend the money on fixing the ten things above instead.
Where to start
If you do only three things this week:
- Darken your text and raise the size to 16 pixels.
- Add alt text to the images on your five busiest pages.
- Make the call and WhatsApp buttons large and well spaced.
Then work down the list a little each month. If your site is also slow on phones, our guide to improving website speed is the natural next step, since a page nobody waits for is not accessible to anyone.
Frequently asked questions
Is website accessibility a legal requirement in India?
Government websites must follow official accessibility guidelines, and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 expects service providers to make services accessible. Enforcement against small private businesses is uncommon today, but the direction is clear. Ask a lawyer if you work in a regulated field.
Does accessibility help SEO?
Yes, indirectly. Alt text, clear headings, descriptive links, readable text and mobile-friendly pages all help Google understand a page, and they keep visitors from leaving.
How much does it cost to make a website accessible?
For a small site, most of the fixes in this guide are changes to colours, sizes and text, which a developer can do in a few hours. A full professional audit costs more and is mainly needed by larger organisations.
What is a screen reader?
Software that reads the contents of a screen aloud for people who cannot see it well. TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on iPhone are built in, and you can try them on your own site from the phone's accessibility settings.