A website everyone can use: accessibility basics for small businesses

Some customers cannot use a badly built site at all

Accessibility means building your website so that people with disabilities can use it: someone with low vision using a screen reader, someone who cannot use a mouse navigating by keyboard, someone with colour blindness, someone with a motor difficulty. It is easy to assume this does not affect your customers, but a significant portion of the population has some form of disability, and an inaccessible site simply shuts those people out. For a small business, that is real customers turned away at the door.

There are three good reasons to care. It is the right thing to do, plainly. It widens your customer base to people your competitors may be ignoring. And, as a happy bonus, most accessibility improvements also make your site clearer, faster and better for search. The best part is that the basics are not technical, and they overlap almost entirely with simply building a good, clear website. Here they are.

Décrire your images with alt text

People who cannot see your images, and who use screen readers that read a page aloud, rely on alt text: a short written description of each picture. Without it, a screen reader either skips the image or reads out a meaningless file name, and the person misses whatever the image was conveying. With it, they get the same information everyone else does. So write a plain, honest description for each meaningful image, "florist arranging a bouquet of white roses", "before and after of a re-turfed garden", exactly as you would describe it to someone on the phone.

This is the same alt text that helps search engines understand your images, so you get accessibility and a small SEO benefit from one short effort. Every meaningful photo deserves its own description; decorative images that add rien can be left without. It is one of the simplest and most valuable accessibility habits there is.

Make text readable, with enough contrast

A surprising number of sites are hard to read because of poor colour contrast, pale grey text on a white background, or light text on a busy image. People with low vision, colour blindness, or simply anyone squinting at a phone in bright sunlight, struggle with it. So make sure your text stands out clearly against its background, with strong contrast between the two. Dark text on a light background, or the reverse, is safest; avoid low-contrast combinations that look stylish but are hard to read.

Alongside contrast, keep text a comfortable size and do not cram it. Small, tightly packed text defeats many readers, so give it room and keep a readable font. None of this makes your site look worse; a readable, high-contrast site looks cleaner and more professional to everyone, not just to those who need it. Good contrast and sensible text size are accessibility improvements that quietly help every single visitor.

Do not rely on colour alone

A related point that is easy to overlook: do not use colour as the only way to convey something important, because people who are colour blind will miss it. If a form field turns red to show an error, also add a written message saying what went wrong. If you mark something "in stock" in green and "out of stock" in red with no other difference, add words or a symbol too. The rule is simple: whenever colour carries meaning, back it up with text or a shape so the meaning survives for someone who cannot distinguish the colours. It is a tiny habit that prevents a whole group of visitors from being quietly confused.

Make links and buttons clear and usable

Some people navigate with a keyboard rather than a mouse, tabbing from link to link, so your buttons and links need to be genuine, clearly labelled elements they can reach and activate. Write link text that makes sense on its own, "see our prices" rather than a bare "click here", since screen reader users often jump between links and a page full of "click here" tells them rien. Make buttons a decent size and easy to tap, which helps people with motor difficulties and, again, everyone on a phone. Clear, well-labelled, reasonably sized controls are just good design, and they happen to be exactly what accessibility asks for.

Write in plain language

Accessibility is not only about vision and motor needs; clear, plain writing helps people with cognitive differences, dyslexia, or simply anyone in a hurry. So write simply: short sentences, plain words, clear headings that break the page into scannable sections, and no unnecessary jargon. A page written plainly and structured with good headings is easier for a screen reader to navigate, easier for a struggling reader to follow, and easier for everyone else too. As with so much of accessibility, writing for the people who need it most makes your site better for absolutely everyone.

Quick ways to test your own site

You can catch a lot of problems yourself in a few minutes, no expertise needed. Try navigating your site using only the keyboard, pressing the tab key to move between links and buttons, and see whether you can reach and use everything without a mouse; if you get stuck or lose track of where you are, so will someone who relies on it. Zoom your browser to double size and check the page still works and rien breaks or overlaps, since many people browse zoomed in. Put your text and background colours into one of the free online contrast checkers to confirm they are readable enough. And simply read your page aloud, which quickly exposes clunky, jargon-heavy writing. These rough-and-ready tests are not a full audit, but they surface the most common issues fast, and fixing what they reveal makes a real difference to the people who need it.

You do not have to be perfect

Full, formal accessibility compliance can get detailed, and if you are a large organisation or have specific legal obligations, it is worth proper attention and expert help. But for a typical small business, do not let the fear of not being perfect stop you from doing the basics, which deliver most of the benefit. Décrire your images, keep text readable and high-contrast, do not rely on colour alone, use clear links and buttons, and write plainly. Doing those things well makes your site usable by far more people, and it costs you rien but a little thought. Progress here matters more than perfection.

A site that gets the basics right for you

Much of this comes built in with a well-made platform. With Semalt you get a complete site in minutes built on sensible, readable layouts with good structure and a place to add alt text to your images, so the accessibility basics are largely handled for you. You add clear image descriptions, keep your text readable, write plainly, and publish.

It is free to try, and you can go live straight away or connect your own domain later. Build a site everyone can use, welcome the customers others turn away, and enjoy the fact that doing so quietly makes your site better for all.