Can your customers actually read your website?

Accessibility has an image problem. It sounds like a legal obligation, it is usually explained in acronyms, and it is frequently sold by people whose opening line is a warning about being sued.

In practice it is much duller and much more useful than that. Most accessibility problems on small business websites are not exotic. They are thin grey text on a white background, type set too small because it looked elegant, opening hours locked inside a photograph, a phone number you can’t tap accurately, and a PDF price list that a phone refuses to open.

None of that is a disability issue in the narrow sense. It is a most-people-in-poor-light issue that becomes an impossible issue for some.

What the law actually says, without the scaremongering

If you run a private business in the UK, the relevant law is the Equality Act 2010. As a service provider you are expected to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people aren’t put at a substantial disadvantage. The word doing the work there is “reasonable”, and what is reasonable for a four-person firm in Oswestry is not what is reasonable for a bank.

There is no UK accessibility certificate, no register you must appear on, and no annual audit you are obliged to commission. If someone tells you otherwise, they are selling an audit.

What people often cite instead are the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations of 2018. Those are real and quite demanding, and they apply to councils, the NHS, schools and similar bodies. They are not aimed at your plumbing business, which is why most of the alarming search results on this subject are irrelevant to you.

One genuine exception worth knowing: if you sell goods or services into the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025, with exemptions for the smallest businesses. If a meaningful share of your customers are in the EU, that is a conversation to have with somebody who knows your situation rather than a paragraph on a web design blog.

So: no panic. Just a short list of sensible things.

The changes that fix most of it

Contrast and text size

This is the big one, and it is almost always a design decision somebody made because it looked calm. The usual guideline is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 between normal text and its background. Light grey on white routinely fails it. You can check any two colours for free with WebAIM’s contrast checker.

While you’re there, look at your font size on a phone. If you find yourself squinting, so does everybody over fifty, and they are not going to mention it.

Real text, not pictures of text

Opening hours, prices and addresses set inside an image can’t be read aloud by a screen reader, can’t be enlarged without going blurry, can’t be copied, and can’t be found by Google. It is one of the few mistakes that hurts accessibility and search visibility in exactly the same way.

Links that say where they go

“Click here” tells somebody using a screen reader nothing, because those readers often jump from link to link out of context. “See our price list” works for everybody, including sighted readers skimming in a hurry.

Alt text that describes the picture

A sentence describing what is in the image. Decorative photographs can be left blank so they are skipped. Photographs that carry information need describing properly.

Forms with labels that stay put

Labels that vanish the moment you start typing are a small cruelty on a long form. Keep them visible, mark the required fields honestly, and if something goes wrong, say what and where in plain words.

Don’t rely on colour alone

Red text for “out of stock” means nothing to a colour-blind visitor, and roughly one man in twelve is affected. Add a word, a symbol, anything at all besides the colour.

Tap targets big enough for a real thumb

Buttons and links close together, on a phone, in the cold, wearing gloves. If you have ever rung the wrong person from your own contacts list, you already understand the principle.

Captions on video

Useful for deaf visitors, and used constantly by everybody watching with the sound off, which on a phone is most people most of the time.

Four free ways to check your own site

• Put the mouse away. Press Tab repeatedly and try to get to your contact form using only the keyboard. If you get stuck, or you cannot see where you are, that is a real problem for real people.
• Zoom to 200%. On a desktop browser, press Ctrl and plus a few times. Things should reflow, not overlap or disappear.
• Go outside. Look at your own website on a phone in bright daylight. Low contrast becomes invisible contrast.
• Ask someone. Give your phone to a relative in their seventies and ask them to find your opening hours. Say nothing. Watch. It is the most informative test on this list and the most uncomfortable.

There are automated tools as well, WAVE and the Lighthouse tab in Chrome being the usual free ones. They will find genuine faults and miss the important ones, because no machine can tell you whether a sentence makes sense.

Do you need an accessibility statement?

Public sector bodies must publish one. A private business doesn’t have to, but a short honest page is a decent thing to have: what you have done, what you know isn’t perfect yet, and how somebody should tell you if they are stuck. A statement that quietly claims full compliance while the site fails on contrast is worse than no statement at all.

The Shropshire bit

Shropshire has an older population profile than England as a whole, and a good deal of its custom is spent in the market towns by people who are in no hurry to be patronised about technology. If your prices are set in 12-pixel light grey, a significant slice of your actual customers cannot read them.

They will not email to tell you. They will use the competitor whose website they could read.

That, really, is the whole commercial argument. Accessibility is not a compliance exercise with a certificate at the end. It is making sure the people who want to give you money are able to.

How we handle it

Every site we build starts from sensible text sizes, proper contrast, real text rather than pictures of words, and pages that work with a keyboard, which is easier to do at the beginning than to retrofit later. You can read a little more about how we think on our about page.

If you are not sure how your current site stands, run the four free checks above before you ask anybody for a quote. And since page weight and readability tend to travel together, our plain-English guide to Core Web Vitals makes a decent companion piece.