Accessibility Checklist for Small Business Websites

Most small business websites are not built with accessibility in mind, and the people who suffer for it are your customers: someone using only a keyboard, someone with low vision, someone reading on a phone in bright sunlight. Fixing the biggest problems is often quick, and it also tends to make a site easier for everyone and for search engines to read.

You do not need to be technical for this. You only need a browser, your keyboard and about ten minutes.

Before you start

Open your website on a computer. Two free tools help along the way: the Lighthouse report built into Chrome (right-click, Inspect, then the Lighthouse tab) and the WAVE browser extension. Neither finds everything, but they point at real problems.

The ten checks

1. Use only the keyboard. Press Tab to move through the page and Enter to open things. Can you reach every link, button and form field? Can you always see where you are (a visible outline)? If the focus disappears, keyboard users are lost.
2. Zoom to 200%. Press Ctrl and + until the page is at 200%. Is the text still readable, with nothing cut off or overlapping? On a phone-width window, you should not have to scroll sideways.
3. Check the colour contrast. Light grey text on white is the classic mistake. Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background (3 to 1 for large text). Paste your two colours into a free contrast checker such as the one from WebAIM.
4. Describe your pictures. Every picture that carries information needs a short text description (alt text) that says what it shows. Purely decorative pictures should have an empty one, so screen readers skip them.
5. Use headings in order. Each page should have one main heading, then sub-headings below it. Headings are for structure, not for making text bigger, because screen reader users jump between them.
6. Make links say where they go. "Read our prices" is clear. "Click here" repeated five times is not.
7. Label every form field. Each field needs a visible label, and an error message should say what went wrong and how to fix it, not just turn the box red.
8. Do not rely on colour alone. If an error is shown only in red, someone who cannot see red will miss it. Add text or an icon.
9. Add captions to videos. Spoken videos need captions or a written transcript, for people who are deaf and for people watching without sound.
10. Check the basics. Every page needs its own title in the browser tab, and the page language should be set so screen readers pronounce the words correctly.

Then run the automatic check

In Chrome, open Lighthouse and run the Accessibility report on your home page. A high score is good news, but it is not a guarantee: automatic tools only find a part of the problems, which is why the manual checks above matter.

What to do with what you find

Write the problems down and sort them: keyboard access, contrast and forms first, because they stop people from using the site at all. Then send the list to whoever looks after your website. If you do not have someone, I can look at your site and tell you what I would fix first: send me the address through the contact form.

I follow the same checks on my own website, and I describe what I test and what I do not in my accessibility statement. If you want to understand why this matters beyond the rules, read why web accessibility matters for everyone.