Accessibility means people with disabilities can use your website: screen reader users, people who can't use a mouse, people with low vision or color blindness. It's the right thing to build, it's increasingly a legal exposure, and most of it is straightforward once someone points at the specific problems.
Demand letters over inaccessible websites have been aimed at small businesses for years now, and restaurants, medical offices, and retailers get hit most. You don't need to become an expert. You need to avoid the handful of failures that show up in nearly every complaint.
Alt text on images that carry meaning
Screen readers announce images using their alt text. A photo of your team needs a short description of what it shows. A decorative background flourish should have empty alt text so the screen reader skips it rather than reading a filename out loud. The common failure is either no alt text anywhere or alt text stuffed with keywords, which helps nobody.
Color contrast that actually passes
Light gray text on a white background is the single most common violation we find, and designers cause it constantly because it looks refined on a good monitor. The standard asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Free checkers will tell you in seconds whether your body text passes.
Everything reachable by keyboard
Some people browse entirely by keyboard. Tab through your own website and watch what happens. Can you reach every link, open every menu, fill in and submit the contact form? Can you see where you are, or does the focus outline disappear? Dropdown menus and custom-built sliders are the usual places this breaks.
Real headings in a sensible order
Screen reader users jump between headings the way sighted users skim. That only works when headings are actual heading elements in a logical order rather than text made big and bold. One main heading per page, then subheadings nested underneath it. This helps search engines for exactly the same reason.
Forms with labels attached
Every field needs a real label tied to the input, not just placeholder text that vanishes when typing starts. Error messages need to say what went wrong in words rather than turning a box red. This is also the cheapest conversion improvement most forms can get.
Video needs captions
If you publish video with speech in it, it needs captions. Most platforms generate them automatically now, but automatic captions need a pass for names and technical terms. Captions also get watched by the large share of people who play video with the sound off.
Skip the overlay widgets
The plugins that promise instant compliance through a floating accessibility button are worth a warning. They don't fix the underlying markup, accessibility advocates broadly reject them, and businesses using them have still been sued. Some complaints have specifically named the overlay. Fix the actual website instead.
A sane way to start
Run a free automated scan to catch the mechanical problems, fix contrast and alt text, then tab through the website yourself. That combination catches most of what matters. Automated tools only find roughly a third of real issues, so the manual keyboard pass is the part people skip and shouldn't.